A research team led by Professor Young-Im Doh of the Graduate School of Culture and Technology at KAIST and Professor Kyung-Myeon Lee of the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Sciences collaborated with Yonsei University (Prof. Published an online book titled ‘Game Design Guide: Focusing on Game Users Over 50’.
This book is the result of industry-university cooperation for three years from 2019 to 2021 with support from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency. . Multidisciplinary experts from computer science, psychology, game design, and smart aging participated in the research and writing.
The research team operated the first generation game living lab and shared the good points and difficulties while playing the game with various senior users, and found improvements together. In addition, various cognitive and motor experiments related to game play were conducted to create a game design guide covering game difficulty, sensory and cognitive factors, game rules, story and characters, and social factors.
According to the 2021 game user survey by the Korea Creative Content Agency, 57.1% of those in their 50s and 37.15% of those aged 60 to 65 are using the game, and their game money/item purchase rate is not low compared to other generations. However, since most of the games on the market are aimed at young users, there were many cases where they felt uncomfortable using the game.
For example, if the difficulty of real-time games that require improvisation and precise timing is too difficult, the size of text or objects is too small, or the game interface or game method is too complex, senior users may experience inconvenience and They don’t even try or give up on the game. In addition, even if the concept or story of the game does not gain the sympathy of the seniors or contains an age-discriminatory perspective, senior users will have a negative experience.
This guide analyzes the game experiences of users in their 50s and older, and converts them into game design grammar for easy reference by game creators. In addition, we tried to convey the experience of senior game users vividly with detailed examples. This guide is expected to be helpful in various situations, such as when making games for game users in their 50s or older, when trying to increase access to existing games, and when creating game-related educational programs for people in their 50s or older. .
The guide is composed of a total of 5 chapters, and in Chapter 1, considering the visual-motor coordination ability of each age group from 20s to 80s, an appropriate level of difficulty was suggested for each game task. In addition, we have summarized the points to be considered when designing a game by detailed game elements such as audiovisual elements, cognitive and motor elements, game rules, story and characters, social elements, and in-app advertisements and payments.
Chapter 2 introduces the process for creating such a guide. It contains detailed information on how the first-generation game living lab has been operated for 3 years from 2019, visual-motor coordination experiments, cognitive and brain wave experiments, and workshops involving citizen researchers.
Chapter 3 summarizes user characteristics such as visual-motor coordination ability, cognitive ability, and social-emotional characteristics of senior players. In Chapter 4, we proposed a game service model that can promote the use of games by seniors in the future, and introduced examples of games that different generations can play together. Finally, Chapter 5 contains the limitations of the study, the direction of future research, and precautions when using the guide.
One of the lead authors, Young-Im Do, a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Culture and Technology at Woori University, said, “If we lower the initial barrier to entry by increasing access to game interfaces that can feel the cognitive burden associated with aging, we can reduce the number of middle-aged and elderly people in an aging society. It can be enticed to games of this genre”, he said.
