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Play it our way: customization of game rules in children's interactive outdoor games

Published: 17 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In traditional outdoor games, such as tag and hideandseek, children play in groups, and typically changes to the rules are negotiated fluidly, without disrupting the game flow. In contrast, games that are supported by interactive technology are usually rather static, not allowing for easy adaption towards the children's narrative and desired rules. We present an iterative design process in which 65 children aged 512 participated in different iterations, concluding with the design of GameBaker. GameBaker is an application that allows children to modify game rules for Head Up Games, outdoor collocated games supported by interactive handheld devices. We show how children: understand how setting different game rules allows them to modify the game, are able to relate these to how the game is played, and enjoy doing so. This research paves the way towards allowing children to take control of outdoor game technology, to create their own variation of games as they have done for centuries in traditional games.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IDC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Interaction design and children
    June 2014
    378 pages
    ISBN:9781450322720
    DOI:10.1145/2593968
    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: 17 June 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. children
    2. customization
    3. head up games
    4. pervasive gaming
    5. prototyping

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    IDC'14: Interaction Design and Children 2014
    June 17 - 20, 2014
    Aarhus, Denmark

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    IDC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 60 submissions, 30%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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    • (2024)Learning from Learning - Design-Based Research Practices in Child-Computer InteractionProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655754(338-354)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Flipping the Reality of Young Children’s Technology Through the 4Cs: Create, Connect, Communicate, and ControlFuture Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction Research10.1007/978-3-031-71697-3_9(207-229)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
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