Andrea Rosales will be participating in the Silver Gaming Intergenerational Summer School (SGISS) / École d’Été Intergénérationnelle Jeux et Apprentissages 2015 to be held on August 21st and 22nd in Quebec City, Canada.
The paper is authored by Andrea, Sergio Sayago and Josep Blat from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Catalonia). Andrea will lead the session “Older people as creators of causal knowledge games” in the opening section on August 21st.
The conference seeks to gather scholars and attendees interested in a spectrum of topics around the use of technologies along the life span. Its main focus encompasses digital games with purpose (also called “serious games”), intergenerational activities based on play and learning, and the use of storytelling and life narratives.
Abstract. This short paper reports on the experiences of older people (60+) creating casual knowledge games through an Online Game Creation Platform (GCP). Despite the potential of games to contribute to the general wellbeing of older people by enabling them to enjoy later life, most of the efforts on research and development in Human-Computer Interaction focus on games to compensate for the decline of motor and cognitive abilities when we grow older. We capitalize on the strengths, interests and creativity of a set of older people to support them in the creation of personal games. This approach enabled us to design and develop a GCP based on the play style of a set of older people. We evaluated the potential of the platform with 99 older participants who created 15 games. According to them, the game creation experiences increased their self-esteem, helped to improve their ICT skills, made them feel still useful to society, encouraged social interactions, and allowed to evoke their life experiences. Overall, we present a novel way for looking at the relationship between games and older people, not only from their needs but also from their strengths, and also discuss how this view shapes the discourse of ageing adults and digital games.
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Image by Camilla Nilsson under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license
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