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Video games used during play can benefit children’s well-being, if designed with their needs in mind, the new study from the University of Sheffield, LEGO Group and UNICEF has found.
Members of the Literacies and Language and Early Childhood Research Clusters recently published cutting-edge research findings about children’s digital play and well-being in a University of Sheffield research report and in an international UNICEF report.
The RITEC (Responsible Innovation with Technology for Children) project aimed to understand children's well-being in the digital age and explore how future digital games and digital play experiences (DPEs) can be designed to support positive well-being for children, based on evidence. The University of Sheffield conducted research with 50 families of children aged 6-12 from the UK, South Africa, Cyprus, and Australia, collaborating closely with leading researchers from the Centre for Creative Education in Cape Town, Oulu University in Finland, the University of Cyprus, and Curtin University in Australia.
The new report provides evidence on the impact of digital games on children's overall well-being and how their gaming experiences affect their self-perception, relationships, and environment.
The findings indicate that digital play supports children's well-being in various ways, though these benefits can differ significantly among children and their families. The study aims to provide a framework to guide the future design of digital play experiences for children.
Dr. Fiona Scott from the School of Education at the University of Sheffield commented, “Children playing digitally has often been perceived negatively or valuable only when children are formally learning something. There has been much discussion in the press and within research about how children spending more time online can harm their well-being, but this study sought to find out if digital play experiences have benefits for children, and if so, how we can use this research to inform how digital games can be developed to better support these benefits in the future.”
Researchers working with families found that digital play supports well-being by enhancing children's perceptions of autonomy (feeling in control and having freedom of choice) and competence (feeling capable and achieving mastery).
Digital play enabled children in the study to explore, construct, and express aspects of their identities, develop emotional awareness and regulation, and think and act creatively. Contrary to some past media narratives, the digital play experiences allowed children to feel connected to others and be aware of others, including through nurturing play.
Later this year, the project will release a guide to help businesses integrate these findings into the design of their games.
You can read the UNICEF report online: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/responsible-innovation-technology-children
You can also explore the fuller findings of the Sheffield team in their research report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N3y-3goEjHbtMlWzOCT7UEmzicS90dNg/view?usp=drive_link or mini-site here: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/digitalplayandwellbeing/.
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