Socially Aware Design of Games: an early workshop for game designers

Abstract

Designing games to encourage players' positive and healthy behaviors is both a necessity and a challenge. Although the game research field has relevant contributions in literature, especially regarding gamification, serious games and persuasive computing, when the application domain is critical, such as education or health, it is necessary to understand the context in which a game will be inserted before actually proposing and designing it. This paper presents a collaborative workshop for problem understanding and requirements elicitation in the early stages of game design. The workshop stresses the importance of problem-understanding from a sociotechnical perspective before developing a game and before directly engaging other stakeholders. The paper presents the workshop in practice where designers must understand how to support children to perform speech therapy exercises outside hospital settings. The workshop was conducted to produce a systemic understanding of the problem domain, of human and technical aspects, possible solutions and their implications to be used as inputs for game design and evaluation. The paper presents the workshop and its main results, discussing lessons learned and highlighting the need for early and lean practices to promote the socially aware design of games.