Designing for Intergenerational Play

In this chapter, we bring everything together and provide guidance on how educators and game designers can facilitate productive family engagement around video games. We discuss activity structures we designed and tested in after school and home environments that help connect school, home, and community learning. We also draw upon two design-based research projects to examine how to develop video games for families that expand the current definition of “family-friendly games.”

Developing a Learning Culture through Gaming

In this chapter, we expand upon Seymour Papert’s notion of “learning culture”. Specifically, we describe how the traditional expert-novice relationship between parents and children has changed over the last decade with children taking the role of an expert when it comes to technology. We propose that successful participation in 21st century for children starts with collaborative intergenerational experiences at home around technology, and video gaming in particular is a promising context for parents and children to work as partners and develop the dispositions that can be “transfer” to other contexts (e.g. workplace).

Family Learning and Video Games

The family environment is an important social context where learning takes place for adults and children of all ages, and perhaps the only context in which participation occurs over a life-span. In this social context, playing games has always been one of many activities family members do individually and together that engages them in learning. In this chapter, we offer a broad perspective on learning and discuss how games of all sorts can provide opportunities for learning, and how families can take more advantage of these potential learning experiences.

Understanding Oneself, Each Other, and the World

What is it about “play” that makes it a powerful context for developing a family identity and fostering social ties? In this chapter, we discuss how play supports families in expressing their feelings, sharing experiences, developing understanding, and making sense of the world around them. We describe playing games as an opportunity space in that they provide opportunities for thinking through what one values, desires, and cares about in the real world, and becomes a context for identity in the making. We demonstrate how families around Sims and intentionally designed video games for families support the construction, negotiation, and enactment of family and individual identities in non-threatening and playful ways between parents and adolescent children.

A New Perspective on Games and Families

This chapter introduces the core argument of the book- that intergenerational play and family interactions around video games can promote connection, communication, and learning - and describe the context and rationale for the book. The media often portray video games as addictive, violent, mind-numbing, and a cause of physical inactivity, leading parents to view games as something to be restricted, managed, and otherwise controlled. We briefly address the lack of evidence for these negative consequences of gaming, and the limitations of a purely psychological view of gaming. We offer an alternative way of understanding gaming and its role in a family, social and societal context.

Strengthening Family Relations

In this chapter, we discuss how video games promote family connection and communication, similar to other digital media technologies such as Skype and Facebook. Although video games are not intentionally designed to connect people, they provide a context for shared experiences that facilitate a sense of closeness and togetherness. The family shared experiences often organized around individual and family interests in video gaming and other topics. We provide examples of five families with diverse backgrounds to show the different ways family members build and sustain connections across generations and various aspects of their lives.