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.

Conducting Socially Aware and Value Oriented Investigations: a Case Study on the Violence Against Children and Adolescents

“…Before engaging with critical stakeholders, designers need to develop their understanding and sensitivity to the problem as a matter of responsibility with the stakeholders' time and challenges (Ferrari et al, 2020). In this way, this work was done as an initial step aiming at the involvement of stakeholders in a participatory way in next iterations of problem understanding and design.…”

“…When dealing with critical themes, understanding the context and paying attention to values before defining problems and involving interested parties is a matter of social and ethical responsibility (Ferrari et al 2020). The authors used artifacts from (and inspired by) the Socially Aware Design approach to promote conversations and discussions among designers in the early stages of a game design.…”

Framework socialmente consciente para criação de RPGs para contribuir com o processo de ensino e aprendizagem de Engenharia de Software

“…Em Tangible and Shared Storytelling: Searching for the Social Dimension of Constructionism, [Baranauskas and Posada 2017] projetam um ambiente socioconstrucionista, o CPES (Ambiente Programável Colaborativo para Contac ¸ão de Histórias) e apresentam sua lógica de design e modelo de design de interac ¸ão. Em Socially Aware Design of Games: an early workshop for game designers [Ferrari et al 2020] realizam oficinas de design semiopartivipativo propostos pelo DSC na concepc ¸ão de um jogo para apoiar crianc ¸as em exercícios fonoaudiológicos.…”

End-users in recovery from substance use disorders as designers of Personas and digital games with therapeutic potential

“…However, developing games that encourage positive, healthy behaviors is a challenge. The design of therapeutic digital games is in a critical context, which involves ethical and social responsibility (Ferrari et al, 2020). Bonacin et al (2019) also point out challenges in development by end users.…”