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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Children and young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle with communication and social interaction skills (Hyman et al., 2020). Studies show benefits for people with ASD from playing videogames (Baldassarri et al., 2020; Malinverni et al., 2017). Still, current solutions targeting this audience tend to assume and expose educational goals (e.g., Zakari et al., 2014). We’ve been researching and developing guidance on how to design videogames with the potential to improve those skills while providing experiences that players can perceived as purely ludic. Previously, we distilled a set of six guidelines (Alves et al., 2021) that we were able to put into practice in specific games. However, the guideline that suggests to “focus level design on the progressive sophistication of communication and interaction” has been more challenging. To a certain extent this can be attributed to the scale of the projects in which we were able to experiment with that guideline, so far, which did not allow the team to reach its full implementation. We realised that while the other guidelines can be applied right from early stages and in small developments, this guideline, consistently with what it suggests, implies more complexity, at least to include alternate ways to perform some game actions. The acknowledgement of this disparity and the desire to provide tangible instantiations of that “sophistication”, led us to dedicate even more attention to this aspect and to systematize some major ideas so that we can share them while we are also working in their application. A key point of our proposal is that the introduction of more complex ways to communicate and interact is meant to allow players to engage in new strategies (more challenging but also more advantageous), if/when they are willing to try them, but previous alternatives should remain as usable. The specificities of the target users demand a cautious approach to changes and to the anxiety implied by risking and possibly failing. Players should be able to mix the alternatives and go back and forth in complexity, according to what they are prepared to invest in each specific circumstance. Another important aspect is that the unfolding of new alternatives, regarding communication and interaction, should be triggered by each player’s behaviour patterns and not directly by the game levels common to all players. This implies to rethink or complement conventional patterns for game level design. Currently, we are working on ways to enrich the tools for players to communicate and interact. The underlaying ideas are not innovative per se, in the sense that we can reference games (for the general public) that integrate them in some way or context. Our argument is that it is relevant to assemble and redesign them, considering the specific purpose of this research. For instance, in previous experiments we understood that it would be relevant that a player (playing character) could signal other players an interest in their collaboration or proximity. This would support that kind of proactivity (should it emerge) while influencing others to interact. We also consider very worth integrating mechanisms that allow expressing empathy towards other characters, or other emotional displays. Again, many games embed solutions that include predefined messages and/or graphics (e.g. emojis), but the specificities of our target audience require that the system is tailored in a way that is suitable and may contribute to developing this type of externalization of one’s feelings. Ultimately, it would be relevant to test a message system closer to an in-game chat, for more advanced levels of communication. Finally, we are also very interested in further integrating trading systems, common to many games, as a way to entice players to interact.
Description
Keywords
Autism Spectrum Disorder children communication social interaction videogames
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Publisher
Escola Superior de Educação de Viseu, Instituto Politécnico de Viseu