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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2020: Cross-Cultural Design. User Experience of Products, Services, and Intelligent Environments pp 325–336Cite as

Play It My Way: Participatory Mobile Game Design with Children in Rural Nepal

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12192))

Abstract

This paper describes a participatory study with 35 children, aged 9–12, from a rural Nepalese village in the Himalayan Mountains where they were asked to draw a picture or pictures of a game that they would love to have in a digital pen pal app that is being developed. Altogether 58 game designs were collected. Seven of them were new game ideas with some reflecting the children’s own culture and community. There were also inevitably some cases where the children appeared to have copied from each other.

This paper gives details on how the study was conducted, it gathers together the full results and then reflects on both the worth of the drawn images for the game design and the usefulness of the drawing-based design method. The paper also analyses and critiques the effectiveness of the participatory design method with children.

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Acknowledgement

We thank all the children for the participation, the Teachers for the assistance and support and the Head Teacher for allowing us to do the study in the School.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK

    Dev Raj Lamichhane & Janet C. Read

Authors
  1. Dev Raj Lamichhane
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  2. Janet C. Read
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dev Raj Lamichhane .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Lamichhane, D.R., Read, J.C. (2020). Play It My Way: Participatory Mobile Game Design with Children in Rural Nepal. In: Rau, PL. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. User Experience of Products, Services, and Intelligent Environments. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12192. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49788-0_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49788-0_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49787-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49788-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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