Understanding Kids, Play, and Interactive Design

How to Create Games Children Love

Mark Schlichting

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429664830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Sciences générales de l'informatique

This book is a way of sharing insights empirically gathered, over decades of interactive media development, by the author and other children's designers. Included is as much emerging theory as possible in order to provide background for practical and technical aspects of design while still keeping the information accessible. The author's intent for this book is not to create an academic treatise but to furnish an insightful and practical manual for the next generation of children's interactive media and game designers.

Key Features

• Provides practical detailing of how children's developmental needs and capabilities translate to specific design elements of a piece of media
• Serves as an invaluable reference for anyone who is designing interactive games for children (or adults)
• Detailed discussions of how children learn and how they play
• Provides lots of examples and design tips on how to design content that will be appealing and effective for various age ranges
• Accessible approach, based on years of successful creative business experience, covers basics across the gamut from developmental needs and learning theories to formats, colors, and sounds

PART
1

Sparking Interactive Magic

What makes an interactive experience compelling for children? What turns a simple click or tap into a magical interchange? Truly engaging interactive content for children is a blend of psychology and technology that listens and responds to kids’ interests. To create great products for children, designers need to understand the nature and value of intrinsic play, dynamics of attention, and strategies for continued engagement. Knowing what delights and excites a child’s imagination allows you to deliver a satisfying experience that brings kids back again and again.

Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.¹

—Joseph Chilton Pearce, author

CHAPTER
1

The Power of Play

Why start a book on design by talking about play? Because play is what children do, how they learn, and what they are doing while in a designer’s program. For both the user and the designer, play is the primary component and the goal in good design. The bulk of this book is about how to create dynamic, engaging play experiences. It’s important to begin by knowing more about play itself. Children often use the word play to describe activities they don’t have to do. Kids consider play to be pleasurable, and, for them, tasks that aren’t fun aren’t play.²

For great children’s design, play is not an essential ingredient, it is the essential ingredient. Play is instinctive for kids, and it is how they are wired to learn naturally. To recognize and comprehend different patterns of play is paramount in creating interactive experiences that invite and support continued involvement and exploration. This chapter covers various aspects of play, how to recognize it, and what it means to kids.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning…. Play is the real work of childhood.³

—Mister Rogers

The Importance of Play

Play is not frivolous or trivial in its impact on humans. It is a basic biological and psychological function that supports our health and well-being in countless ways each day, lowering our stress, helping us learn new skills, or facilitating congenial relationships. When we play, we open ourselves to new possibilities, insight, and creativity. Playfulness helps us view life with optimism, create new options by testing alternatives, and develop social coping skills for a happier life.⁴

We have all seen the joy on children’s shining faces when they are deeply engrossed and engaged in play. Play is what kids do best. It is essential to a joyful life, and it is an instrumental partner in learning.

What We Learn Through Play

In addition to social skills, children develop motor skills, spatial sense, creativity, organizational and classification skills, observational skills, abstract thinking, and hand–eye coordination through play. This applies to digital play as well as real-world physical play. For example, a game like Tetris involves many of the same spatial and pattern recognition skills as building with wooden blocks.⁵ A good digital product will leave room for creativity, open-ended play, and self-direction, the same qualities that make more traditional types of play so important to growth and development.⁶

What else does play do? It may surprise you to know that pretend play improves language acquisition and facility with numbers.⁷ Social play and collaboration also contribute to literacy.⁸ Classification and observation skills employed in many digital games and activities are the same skills useful in learning science.⁹

Play is central even to games or products whose primary function is to teach, rather than to entertain. Children master new tasks and abilities through practice and repetition, and we are all more likely to repeat something when we enjoy doing it. When children are playing and having fun, they are also more absorbed and more likely to spend extended time on task. This depth of concentration is important in all aspects of life, from childhood to adulthood. Not only that, but in a state of play, kids learn in a different—and often more effective—way than they do when they’re working or studying in a traditional classroom setting.¹⁰

Play in the classroom. Play doesn’t just help kids have better concentration and focus. It also reaches out to many kinds of learning styles, something traditional classroom methods can’t always do. For example, a school system invested in the phonics method may have trouble reaching students who see things from a whole language approach, or a student with delayed motor skills may struggle to master early writing. Learning delays, ADHD, and autism-spectrum issues may compound the difficulty. Play distinguishes itself from traditional approaches because it engages innate learning patterns and methods.

A key characteristic of many kinds of play is the use of multiple senses (not just vision, but hearing, touch, and physical movement). When all the senses are engaged, it also happens that learning is improved.¹¹ Schools are catching onto this idea, and they’re beginning to use methods like kinesthetic learning (e.g., learning reading through movement) to motivate nontraditional learners.¹²

Too much instruction impedes involvement. Although many children learn a great deal from direct instruction, research has shown that some pathways of discovery are closed off when too much direction is given.¹³ Young children decrease exploratory play with a toy when its use is first demonstrated by an adult.¹⁴ Similarly, the amount learned by playing a video game, which allows creativity and self-direction, can be drastically higher than the same content learned through a lecture.¹⁵ Yet traditional styles of teaching in early primary school rely on this kind of direct pedagogy: students imitating teachers or teachers directly instructing students. Minimal or no instruction, on the other hand, leads to exploration, experimentation, and discovery, which means more time spent with the toy or game.¹⁶ Regardless of whether you want a child to learn from your product, these principles apply. Understanding basic phenomena like these allows designers to make decisions that maximize the time a child wants to spend with a product.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.¹⁷

—Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of media theory

Good design is important. Parents and teachers appreciate when a game or toy fulfills the dual purpose of entertaining as well as teaching. There are many products for children that are described as “educational” for parents’ or teachers’ sake, but many of these products fail to inspire the child. When an interactive title is designed correctly, children want to get their hands on it. Tapping into innate childhood play patterns and interests transforms a dull subject into a delightful experience. All of this means that what you do as a designer is incredibly important.

Respected psychologist Peter Gray draws two connections between play and learning that are useful for interactive designers to consider: First, that curiosity is complementary to play, motivating exploration and learning; second, that an exploration process often precedes play—a child will explore a new item or device, then, gaining confidence, will begin to play with it. The key takeaway for a designer is that a toy or game must offer opportunities for exploration and rewards for curiosity. These qualities will encourage play. A desire to play means a desire to repeat processes and practice skills, the foundation of mastery. Further, Gray writes that play is the primary component of what education specialist Sugata Mitra calls “minimally invasive education.” The desire to learn comes from the desire to play, not from a promised external reward like a good grade.¹⁸

Kids are naturally curious. Young children in particular are naturally entranced by the magic of life. They love to explore and experiment. You can see this while watching children at the beach as they let grains of sand run slowly through their fingers. They are learning about relative size, granularity, gravity, texture, heat absorption, and more, but what they are doing is playing. They explore something until they have learned what they can about it at that moment. No one has to tell kids to do these things. They do it because it is in their DNA to interact with the world and uncover how things work. Curiosity drives them to experiment, and the consequent insight impels them into further research and experimentation. Curiosity is not some-thing to be afraid of, as in the old admonition “Curiosity killed the cat,” but a quality to be embraced, supported, and developed.

Play is a child’s favorite way to learn. It’s how they are wired. Through play, children can pretend, explore, and rehearse. They can creatively experiment with real-world problems, but in a safe environment. They can try things out without endangering themselves. After all, they are “just playing.” Play is how we all best learn something new, and ultimately how we learn about learning. Ben Franklin was one of many philosophers to express the notion, “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.” Interactive design is at its best when it creates inviting and supportive environments that replicate the involved, self-directed exploration and discovery that kids have been exhibiting for millennia.

Kids need self-directed play and independence. As mentioned in the introduction, today’s children often have more limited opportunities for self-directed and independent play than children of the past. At the same time, some schools, constrained by bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Sparking Interactive Magic
• Part 2: Engaging the Senses
• Part 3: Knowing Your Audience
• Part 4: Creating Digital Playgrounds
• Part 5: Enhancing the Design Process
• Part 6: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index