Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns

Poor literacy remains a barrier to economic empowerment in the developing world. We make the case that “serious games” can make an impact for these learners and highlight that much remains to be learned about designing engaging gameplay experiences for children living in rural areas. Our approach revolves around game design patterns, which are building blocks that can inform game designs. We argue that patterns are beneficial because they facilitate the reuse of existing knowledge about successful games, and can capture contextual information such as domain applicability that has evolve through iterative testing. We describe the design of three mobile games based on patterns and report on a field experiment with rural children in India that evaluated these games against games that were not designed with patterns. We found that patterns are decontextualized design tools that can both help and hinder good designs. We distill lessons on the contextual factors that designers must consider when using patterns to design for this user group. These factors include designing for fun by focusing on the gameplay process and not only the winning conditions, and taking the power structure in local communities into consideration in the game designs. Author Keywords Design pattern, Developing world, India, Mobile game.