Intergenerational Play: Exploring the Needs of Children and Elderly

Abstract

Designers of intergenerational video games face distinctive challenges due to particularly diverse target audiences - many design principles and guidelines used for one target group cannot be applied to the other, and vice versa, because needs and cognitive or physical abilities of children, adults and senior citizens differ substantially. In this paper, we analyze characteristics of children and senior citizens to summarize similarities, and examine existing approaches towards intergenerational play to provide an overview of design opportunities to suit the needs of children and older adults.