Engaging Children in Story Co-Creation for Effective Serious Games

Abstract

Despite a growing interest in player-centred methods for serious games, little is known on how to achieve this goal in practice when prospective users are children. Foundational questions remain unanswered, such as to which design dimensions children should contribute, and how and when they should be engaged. This paper presents the methods and results of two studies that inspired Skies of Manawak, a game for developmental dyslexia remediation. The first study engaged 60 children (age 8–13) in 15 ideation workshops to highlight the story and aesthetics of the game. The second study engaged 258 children (age 8–11) in the comparative evaluation of the game demo with a commercial cognitive training system. The results proved the importance and complexity of the early involvement of children in design. Children strongly appreciated the demo, particularly the story their peers contributed to shaping. However, this story deviated from their desires in several critical dimensions. It had to reconcile gender stereotypes and the violence embedded in their narratives with the game’s purpose. An apparent conflict between designers and children’s values emerged, supporting the idea that children’s engagement in serious game design requires effective mediation to avoid compromising the purposes they intend to achieve.

Cosmic Sounds: A Game to Support Phonological Awareness Skills for Children With Dyslexia

“…When children have been involved in the design of game characters, there is a greater likelihood that as players, they will form linkages with these characters [6]. While the results of this pilot study showed that the Cosmic Sounds toolkit of codesigned games resulted in increased engagement (in line with findings from [52]) and a positive impact on the children's phonological awareness skills, specifically in the areas of consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, syllabication, CVCe words, and a combination of all elements/skills, this study has limitations such as the sample size. The findings of this study are based on a semistructured interview with a DAI pedagogical expert and 15 children (although 20 children participated as codesigners).…”

“…Studies show that GBL is one of a number of tools that can be used to enhance the learning process of children with dyslexia especially within the context of story, rewards, clear game goals, and objectives and feedback [15]. Furthermore, the incorporation of task-related activities in GBL assists in attention control in children with dyslexia [52]. GBL has many advantages for children with dyslexia, from the manner in which the content is presented (visual, text based, and aural) to the different learning situations, feedback, rewards, storyline, etc., which can motivate, and inspire them to learn [53].…”

Engaging Citizens in the Bioeconomy: Insights from the Co-Creation and Co-Design in the Development of the Serious Bioeconomy Game “Mission BioHero”

“…Serious games have proven to be effective when used in various contexts because of their ability to teach, persuade, and entertain [33]. Their effectiveness has been measured through the experience of the players: their increase in literacy; raised awareness about the issue in focus; acquired skills and knowledge, etc.…”

“…However, while the importance of co-creation and co-design in serious game development is recognised, there has been a relative lack of focus on their potential to initiate such learning events. It is more known that, for example, co-design has been used to develop game concepts and the initial idea, but less so for the mechanics of the game, gameplay, and other aspects [15,[32][33][34][35]. The emphasis has primarily been on addressing usability and playability concerns rather than exploring the learning and experimentation opportunities that arise from participatory game design processes [7,24].…”

“…Even less research has been done on the co-design of serious games that deal with sustainable development, for example, few of them have been created in the fields of climate change, energy, or the environment, and what directly relates to the topic of this article, in the bioeconomy field [13]. In addition, when it comes to the assessment of the effectiveness of the games that relate to sustainable development, then research has been scarce here as well [11,13,15,32,33].…”