W3C Accessibility Guidelines for Mobile Games

In the past decade, video games have become one of the fastest growing forms or entertainment around the world. In particular, mobile gaming has continued to evolve, becoming increasingly popular for billions of people worldwide. An ongoing issue within this subject is the accessibility issues users' face when playing these types of games. The purpose of this work is to investigate how well current W3C accessibility guidelines support mobile game development. This paper introduces a study that was carried out to determine the current knowledge that participants have of these guidelines, along with the opinions on how important these accessibility guidelines are when creating accessible mobile game content

Design and Development of One-Switch Video Games for Children with Severe Motor Disabilities

Video games are not just played for fun; they have become a handy instrument for the cognitive, emotional, and social development of children. However, several barriers prevent many children with disabilities from playing action-oriented video games, alone or with their peers. In particular, children with severe motor disabilities, who rely on one-switch interaction for accessing electronic devices, find fast-paced games that require rapid decision-making and timely responses, completely unplayable. This article contributes to lowering such barriers by presenting GNomon (Gaming NOMON), a software framework based on the NOMON mode of interaction that allows the creation of action-oriented single-switch video games. The article reports the results of two studies that evaluate the playability and rehabilitation suitability of GNomon-based video games. The playability of GNomon-based games is evaluated by assessing their learnability, effectiveness, errors, satisfaction, memorability, and enjoyability with a group of eight children with severe motor disabilities. The suitability for pediatric rehabilitation is determined by means of a focus group with a team of speech therapists, physiotherapists, and psychologists from a Local Health Agency in Turin, Italy. The results of the playability study are positive: All children had fun playing GNomon-based video games, and seven of eight were able to interact and play autonomously. The results of the rehabilitation-suitability study also entail that GNomon-based games can be exploited in training hand-eye coordination and maintenance of selective attention over time. The article finally offers critical hindsight and reflections and shows possible new future game concepts

Dynamics of Social Play

Digital games have become a social medium. Players are often socially motivated to play games and actively seek out games that offer social interactions. Early studies on games such as World of Warcraft demonstrate that players can form meaningful bonds within the game. Catering to this trend, most game titles now include multiplayer experiences in their gameplay. Despite the growing popularity of social elements within play, we still have little empirically-founded guidance on how to effectively design for social experiences. If we want to design for social play, we have to understand what makes games social. What are the properties of play that are responsible for facilitating social ties between players? We address this question by synthesizing the exiting literature on design recommendations for social play into identify overarching properties of play that we think are the most prolific in literature: cooperation and interdependence. We perform two experimental studies demonstrating how games facilitate trust between players and how cooperation and interdependence are crucial properties of social play. Furthermore, we validate our framework in a field study, investigating the experiences within games that predict in-game social capital. We demonstrate that interdependence and toxicity are strongly linked to the social capital our participants experience in their gaming communities. We also illustrate how in-game social capital is negatively associated with feelings of loneliness and positively associated with need satisfaction of relatedness outside of the context of play. Overall, our findings emphasize how strongly the experiences within the game affect the social ties that emerge from play, suggesting that informed design choices are crucial for the success of social games. This dissertation also contributes to the ongoing debate about the effects that in-game relationships have on the player’s mental health—we show a strong positive link between in-game social capital and markers for psychological well-being. It is easy to disregard in-game relationships, as they are fundamentally distinct from the in-person ones we think of as natural. Yet we cannot ignore the emergence of digital games as a social medium. The more we understand the underlying elements of social play, the better we can design games that bring people closer together

Investigating Avatar Customization as a Motivational Design Strategy for Improving Engagement with Technology-Enabled Services for Health

Technology-enabled services for physical and mental health are a promising approach to improve healthcare globally. Unfortunately, the largest barrier for effective technology-based treatment is participants' gradually fading engagement with effective novel training applications, such as exercise apps or online mental health training programs. Engaging users through design presents an elegant solution to the problem; however, research on technology-enabled services is primarily focused on the efficacy of novel interventions and not on improving adherence through engaging interaction design. As a result, motivational design strategies to improve engagement---both in the moment of use and over time---are underutilized. Drawing from game-design, I investigate avatar customization as a game-based motivational design strategy in four studies. In Study 1, I examine the effect of avatar customization on experience and behaviour in an infinite runner game. In Study 2, I induce different levels of motivation to research the effects of financial rewards on self-reported motivation and performance in a gamified training task over 11 days. In Study 3, I apply avatar customization to investigate the effects of attrition in an intervention context using a breathing exercise over three weeks. In Study 4, I investigate the immediate effects of avatar customization on the efficacy of an anxiety reducing attentional retraining task. My results show that avatar customization increases motivation over time and in the moment of use, suggesting that avatar customization is a viable strategy to address the engagement barrier that thwarts the efficacy of technology-enabled services for health