Mobile gaming with children in rural India: Contextual factors in the use of game design patterns
Proceedings of 3rd Digital Games Research Association International Conference, (2007)Abstract
Poor literacy remains a barrier to economic empowerment
in the developing world. We make the case that “serious
games” can make an impact for these learners and highlight
that much remains to be learned about designing engaging
gameplay experiences for children living in rural areas. Our
approach revolves around game design patterns, which are
building blocks that can inform game designs. We argue
that patterns are beneficial because they facilitate the reuse
of existing knowledge about successful games, and can
capture contextual information such as domain applicability
that has evolve through iterative testing. We describe the
design of three mobile games based on patterns and report
on a field experiment with rural children in India that
evaluated these games against games that were not designed
with patterns. We found that patterns are decontextualized
design tools that can both help and hinder good designs. We
distill lessons on the contextual factors that designers must
consider when using patterns to design for this user group.
These factors include designing for fun by focusing on the
gameplay process and not only the winning conditions, and
taking the power structure in local communities into
consideration in the game designs.
