Do gameplay experiences have the potential to enhance a child's well-being? The teams at the NYU CREATE Lab and the Child Lab at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, partnered to conduct research with the goal to advance the understanding of this possibility.
Digital gameplay is one of the most common and most lengthy activities in adolsecents' daily lives. Games and digital spaces became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when youth not only spent more time online, but also used games in ways to promote well-being, as means of connection and coping.
The goal of the playtesting was to verify that the games engage players in the kind of activities that have the potential to enhance well-being in children. This study is a preparation of the experimental research in which we will test the causal relationship between digital gameplay and child well-being.
The team first informally reviewed dozens of games, evaluating designs for play mechanics that we felt would support well-being, as well as practical issues, e.g., can the game be played on a tablet, is the game available in multiple languages, or is no language required (see Table 1). The list of potential games was created to include a variety of genres and gameplay styles (action, puzzle, resource management, RPG) within age-appropriate potential prior exposure to the game and excluded any titles that most of the children participating in the research would have already played a lot, thereby example, Minecraft is an extremely popular game that is played by many children both in school settings and at home, and so playing for a few more hours as part of our intervention research would be unlikely to have any effect above.
Games selected for inclusion should be:
Age - appropriate and have an ESRB rating of E.
Likely to support one or several well-being indicators.
Reflect the diverse gameplay of our target audience.
Available in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Chinese).
Recognizable games, include LEGO and EPIC published games.
Playable without requiring persistent internet connection.
Playable without requiring in-game purchases.
Playable on low-cost devices.
From this initial collection of games, we then made a "mid-list" of candidate games to be more formally reviewed for support of well-being. Using self determination theory as a framework, we conducted expert reviews to evaluate the games against their potential to support development in the following dimensions of well-being: competence, autonomy, a sense of belonging or connection, curiosity, optimism, and reduced stress or relaxation. Based on this evaluation of their potential for supporting well-being, and drawing from different genres of games, we then made our final selection of six games for inclusion in playtesting, which are listed and described in Table 2.
Tower defense with plants
Soccer with high-flying cars
Puzzle solving through goo ball constructions
Puzzle solving through tower destruction sling shooting birds
Visual pleasing puzzle adventure.
Build and manage a tower for LEGO minifigures.
Research Design
We implemented an observational approach to playtest the games with our target demographic, focusing on the immediate short-term impact of the game session. The observational method is appropriate for this study because we aimed to understand children’s subjective well-being associated with their gameplay experiences. The collected qualitative data allowed us to investigate the extent to which the selected games provide experiences that potentially have positive effects on children’s immediate well-being in order to determine which games to include in the longitudinal experimental study.
[Conducting Data Collection as of Fall 2022] 🚧
