Abstract:

Older people represent a growing proportion of the world population. Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will double from about 11% to 22%. In our occidental societies, the older adults often suffer from social and emotional isolation, and from ageism. In line with other transformations produced by the networked society and by the incorporation of ICTs into the field of digital entertainment, there is a need to re-design the entertainment systems for the older adults, incorporating the population of this age group into the digital culture, and promoting their active aging.
The developed project is a disruptive vision of the intergenerational relations in the actual society, by using digital entertainment as a tool for motivating and for removing physical and social frontiers. The inclusion of older and young people users opened the door to the consideration of questions such as technology acceptance and personalization to take into account their diverse cognitive and physical abilities or even the way they interact each other. Gender and ethical aspects had been considered.
The project focused in the design of personalized pervasive gaming experiences that act dynamically with older people promoting active ageing, by increasing their social relations, particularly intergenerational ones, and improving their overall health and wellbeing. Co-creation techniques and affective and user experience evaluation methods were applied during the development of the gaming experiences.
As result, different experiences were carried out through workshops, in some cases only with older adults (at their homes or in retirement homes) and in other cases intergenerational workshops were held, both with pervasive games in the interactive space JUGUEMOS (developed by the authors in previous projects), as with online games, especially during the time of pandemic.
A multidisciplinary team from different Spanish universities was in charge of covering all the technical and social aspects.

Keywords:

Game experiences, pervasive games, intergenerational, game design, user experience.