Paper Information
| Title | Impacts of Forced Serious Game Play on Vulnerable Subgroups |
| Presenter(s) | Carrie Heeter, Yu-Hao Lee, Brian Magerko and Ben Medler |
| Session | Adventure Games, Role Play, & Forced Play |
| Time | Friday, October 22, 2:30p-3:30p |
| Location | Parlor A |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | We have written about hypothetical ways that vulnerable subgroups of players might face disadvantaged compared to other players when assigned to play a serious game (Magerko, Heeter, & Medler, 2010). In this manuscript we report on a large-scale study in which we measure how three vulnerable subgroups of players (non-gamers, reluctant players, and females) approach and play serious games. This study explores forced play with four different online casual games that were chosen because they represented a variety of genre and serious game design intentions.
Our research strongly suggests that the most important threat to a serious game having its intended impact is when players dislike the game and would not play it on their own, if not assigned to do so. Serious games are likely to be least effective for players who dislike a game and most effective for those who like the game. Non-gamers were at a serious disadvantage as far as performance. To the extent that getting the intended impact from a serious game depends upon playing well, non-gamers were mostly left behind. Non-gamers experienced similar amounts of positive affect but more negative affect in two of the four games, which might be expected to interfere with learning or cognitive benefits. Males tended to seek more difficult challenges in games than females did. Performance was rarely different by gender. Affect was only different for one of the games. The optimal amount of challenge may be the most important gender difference to consider when designing serious games. |
| Top Paper Award | This paper was selected by the program committee as a Meaningful Play 2010 Top Paper. It will be submitted to the Meaningful Play 2010 Special Issue of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS). Due to the copyright requirements of the journal, only the abstract is available in the conference proceedings. |
| More | View PDF of extended abstract |