Digital Games for Rural Indian Children

Matthew Kam, et. al., Carnegie Mellon University

Summary

This is a study to see how well digital games adapt across cultures and the playability issues within. It also performs an analysis of some traditional games.

Details

Videogames can be a great tool for education but a given game may not be as intuitive or exciting for somebody outside the influence of Western culture. Authors designed six different games based on existing successful Western games and tested them in three different Indian communities. Children were allowed to play the game on mobiles for 1.5 hours after giving them a demonstration. Following observations were made:

• Children from urban schools had some prior exposure could understand certain tasks that were not represented in culture but were required for advancing in game.
• Test scores seemed to not matter a lot in public schools.

Authors then went on to compare their games with some traditional games on various patterns and found some key differences. About 25% of concepts were completely missing while a fair proportion of concepts seemed fairly universal. Based on these insights, a new game was designed and following observations were made:

• Children learned the game rules with very little explanation in contrast to previous games.
• Players were visibly excited and seemed to concentrate more on winning the game.
• Players showed engagement in contrast to frustration with previous games.
• Some of the players found the game too easy.

Review

This paper is quite different from other such papers and that is why I decided to blog on it. While the study seemed lopsided with six games in first phase and only one game in second phase, authors do make detailed comments on various parameters where traditional games differ from video games. It also provides an insight into design of such games for different cultural settings.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at CHI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.