Abstract
Co-play of digital games between parents and their children is a fruitful but underutilized parental mediation strategy. Previous research on this topic has resulted in various design recommendations meant to support and encourage co-play. However, most of these recommendations have yet to be applied and systematically validated within co-play focused games. Based on such design recommendations, our demo paper bridges this research gap by advancing the co-play experience of an existing Roblox game, Funomena’s Magic Beanstalk. In our study, we departed from a subset of potential design recommendations to redesign two of Magic Beanstalk’s mini-games. The two in-house redesigned mini-games were then evaluated by parent-child dyads in a qualitative evaluation, comparing the co-play experience of the original and of our redesigned games. This initial evaluation demonstrates that designing games according to established design recommendations has the potential to improve co-play experiences.
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Acknowledgements
This work was conducted with the support and collaboration of the Funomena game studio. Special thanks to Anthony Fudd, Jacob Garbe, and Robin Hunicke for sharing their game design expertise. Thanks to Kjetil Falkenberg, Kristina Höök, and Morten Fjeld for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work. This work was partially funded by industry partners and the Research Council of Norway with funding to the MediaFutures SFI (project number 309339).
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Geffen, J. (2023). Improving Parent-Child Co-play in a Roblox Game. In: Dang-Nguyen, DT., et al. MultiMedia Modeling. MMM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13834. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27818-1_62
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27818-1_62
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