Play It My Way: Participatory Mobile Game Design with Children in Rural Nepal

Abstract

This paper describes a participatory study with 35 children, aged 9–12, from a rural Nepalese village in the Himalayan Mountains where they were asked to draw a picture or pictures of a game that they would love to have in a digital pen pal app that is being developed. Altogether 58 game designs were collected. Seven of them were new game ideas with some reflecting the children’s own culture and community. There were also inevitably some cases where the children appeared to have copied from each other.

This paper gives details on how the study was conducted, it gathers together the full results and then reflects on both the worth of the drawn images for the game design and the usefulness of the drawing-based design method. The paper also analyses and critiques the effectiveness of the participatory design method with children.