Saiger Michael John, Deterding Sebastian, Gega Lina
Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, United Kingdom.
Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
JMIR Serious Games. 2023 Mar 16;11:e42680. doi: 10.2196/42680.
User involvement is widely accepted as key for designing effective applied games for health. This especially holds true for children and young people as target audiences, whose abilities, needs, and preferences can diverge substantially from those of adult designers and players. Nevertheless, there is little shared knowledge about how concretely children and young people have been involved in the design of applied games, let alone consensus guidance on how to do so effectively.
The aim of this scoping review was to describe which user involvement methods have been used in the design of applied games with children and young people, how these methods were implemented, and in what roles children and young people were involved as well as what factors affected their involvement.
We conducted a systematic literature search and selection across the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science databases using State of the Art through Systematic Review software for screening, selection, and data extraction. We then conducted a qualitative content analysis on the extracted data using NVivo.
We retrieved 1085 records, of which 47 (4.33%) met the eligibility criteria. The chief involvement methods were participatory design (20/47, 43%) and co-design (16/47, 37%), spanning a wide range of 45 concrete activities with paper prototyping, group discussions, and playtesting being the most frequent. In only half of the studies (24/47, 51%), children and young people participated as true design partners. Our qualitative content analysis suggested 5 factors that affect their successful involvement: comprehension, cohesion, confidence, accessibility, and time constraints.
Co-design, participatory design, and similar high-level labels that are currently used in the field gloss over very uneven degrees of participation in design and a wide variety of implementations that greatly affect actual user involvement. This field would benefit from more careful consideration and documentation of the reason of user involvement. Future research should explore concrete activities and configurations that can address the common challenges of involving children and young people, such as comprehension, cohesion, confidence, and accessibility.
用户参与被广泛认为是设计有效的健康应用游戏的关键。对于儿童和年轻人作为目标受众而言尤其如此，他们的能力、需求和偏好可能与成年设计师和玩家有很大差异。然而，关于儿童和年轻人具体如何参与应用游戏设计的共享知识很少，更不用说关于如何有效参与的共识性指导了。
本范围综述的目的是描述在与儿童和年轻人一起设计应用游戏时使用了哪些用户参与方法，这些方法是如何实施的，儿童和年轻人以何种角色参与，以及哪些因素影响了他们的参与。
我们使用“通过系统综述实现技术现状”软件在ACM数字图书馆、IEEE Xplore、Scopus和科学网数据库中进行了系统的文献检索和筛选，以进行筛选、选择和数据提取。然后，我们使用NVivo对提取的数据进行了定性内容分析。
我们检索到1085条记录，其中47条（4.33%）符合纳入标准。主要参与方法是参与式设计（20/47，43%）和协同设计（16/47，37%），涵盖了广泛的45项具体活动，其中纸质原型制作、小组讨论和游戏测试最为常见。在只有一半的研究（24/47，51%）中，儿童和年轻人作为真正的设计伙伴参与。我们的定性内容分析表明有5个因素影响他们的成功参与：理解、凝聚力、信心、可及性和时间限制。
协同设计、参与式设计以及该领域目前使用的类似高级标签掩盖了设计参与程度的极不均衡以及极大影响实际用户参与的各种实施方式。该领域将受益于对用户参与原因的更仔细考量和记录。未来的研究应探索能够应对让儿童和年轻人参与所面临的常见挑战（如理解、凝聚力、信心和可及性）的具体活动和配置。
