research-article

Designing digital games for rural children: a study of traditional village games in India

Authors:

John CannyAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 31 - 40

https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518707

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Low educational levels hinder economic empowerment in developing countries. We make the case that educational games can impact children in the developing world. We report on exploratory studies with three communities in North and South India to show some problems with digital games that fail to match rural children's understanding of games, to highlight that there is much for us to learn about designing games that are culturally meaningful to them. We describe 28 traditional village games that they play, based on our contextual interviews. We analyze the mechanics in these games and compare these mechanics against existing videogames to show what makes traditional games unique. Our analysis has helped us to interpret the playability issues that we observed in our exploratory studies, and informed the design of a new videogame that rural children found to be more intuitive and engaging.

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Index Terms

Designing digital games for rural children: a study of traditional village games in India
1. Human-centered computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2009

2426 pages

ISBN:9781605582467

DOI:10.1145/1518701

General Chairs:
Dan R. Olsen
Brigham Young University
,
Richard B. Arthur
Brigham Young University
,
Program Chairs:
Ken Hinckley
Microsoft Research
,
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Scott Hudson
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Saul Greenberg
University of Calgary

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 April 2009

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April 4 - 9, 2009

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CHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,130 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3643981
Ishak SHasran UDin R(2023)Media Education through Digital Games: A Review on Design and Factors Influencing Learning PerformanceEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1302010213:2(102)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020102
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https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1088716
(2022)Learning, Marginalization, and Improving the Quality of Education in Low-income Countries10.11647/obp.0256Online publication date: Jan-2022
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