Emotionally challenging games can satisfy older adults’ psychological needs: From empirical study to design guidelines

Zhou, Min, Peng, Xiaolan, Liu, Binjie, Denisova, Alena, Barathi, Soumya C., Li, Zhuying, Xie, Xurong, Huang, Jin and Tian, Feng 2025. Emotionally challenging games can satisfy older adults’ psychological needs: From empirical study to design guidelines. Presented at: 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, Yokohama, Japan, 26 April - 1 May 2025. Published in: Yamashita, Naomi, Evers, Vanessa, Yatani, Koji, Ding, Xianghua (Sharon), Lee, Bongshin, Chetty, Marshini and Toups-Dugas, Phoebe eds. CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, Art No. 290. 10.1145/3706598.3713899

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Abstract

Older adults often struggle to meet their psychological needs due to retirement and living alone. Recent studies suggest that games featuring emotional challenge (EC) can help fulfill basic psychological needs such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness by facilitating emotional exploration. However, it remains unclear whether older adults can benefit from EC games, whether they find this genre enjoyable, and how these games should be designed to better meet their needs. This work explores older adults’ experiences and perceptions of playing EC games through two studies. The first study involved playing Detroit: Become Human, revealing that older adults derived multifaceted psychological experiences from playing the game. The second study involved a custom-designed game scenario tailored to older adults, demonstrating that meaningful choices significantly influenced autonomy need satisfaction. Based on these findings, we offer five design guidelines for developing EC games that satisfy psychological needs of older adults.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	ACM
ISBN:	9798400713941
Date of Acceptance:	27 February 2025
Last Modified:	01 May 2025 09:21
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177990

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