On the conceptualization, design, and evaluation of appealing, meaningful, and playable digital games for older people

Abstract

While older people tend to be regarded as actual, or potential, players of digital games within literature on Game Studies, Human-Computer Interaction and Gerontechnologu, they are also often considered non-avid users of digital technologies. This contradiction prompted us to conduct a literature review, which revealed (a) insufficient involment of older people within the design of games targeted towards this group, and (b) insuficient understanding of their everyday digital gameplay. In this paper, we present the conceptualisation, design and evaluation of digital games that active older people found to be sufficiently appealing, playable and meaningful. A 6-month ethnography of the play experiences of 170 older people helped us to conceptualise these games, which were co-designed through playful everyday activities. To facilitate the development of these games, we designed and evaluated an online game creation platform, which enabled 99 older people with different cultural backgrounds to create, play, and contribute to games.

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has partially been funded by Fundación General CSIC and Obra Social “la Caixa” through the WorthPlay project. The authors also knowledge the support from the EEE (TIN2011-28308-C03-03) and RESET (TIN2014-53199-C3-3-R9 projects, from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and Alliance 4 Universities post-doctoral fellowship (2012-2014).