Designing Digital Games for Rural Children: A Study of Traditional Village Games in India

Comments:
none yet

Summary:
This paper described a study done on rural Indian children and their interactions with video games.  The ultimate purpose of this game is to help build effective learning games for rural children in India.  There is a low attendance rate at schools but the cell phone market is growing at a phenomenal rate putting a game platform in many rural hands.

The researchers found many interesting and notable differences in how the rural Indian children would interact with the western games as opposed to how the western children would react.  For example many children didn't understand that the frog in Frogger could move side to side.  They only attempted to move the frog vertically, modeling their real life experiences in attempting to cross a busy street.  The children at the wealthier school however were mostly able to figure this out because they had been exposed to western video games before and knew what to expect in terms of capabilities.

The researchers attempted to study many traditional non-digital Indian games in an attempt to discover known elements that they could include in a game that would make it easily accessible and entertaining for the rural children.  They observed many trends such as that in traditional games there is no sense of partial damage as we see in many western games.  When a negative action occurs on a player that player is either out or not.  This, as they described, would be a very important concept to add to any game they decide to create.

Discussion:
This is a very important work that could have very widespread consequences in India.  I know when I was a kid my dad bought me a few educational games and I loved playing them so I learned a lot from them.  My situation was not as dire however because had I not learned from the games I would have learned in school.  In the rural Indian communities there is no such guarantee.  I feel that this work could be incredibly useful and beneficial to many people.

The paper was overall quite solid.  The only complaint that I had was that the group wasn't taking into account the cell phone usage at the moment.  One could argue that it would be good to get a head start now before cell phones got big though and I would agree.

I would strongly encourage the researchers to continue their work and use their new found knowledge to attempt to make a game for the Indian children.  While this is stated to be their goal it seems as if it is time to fulfill that.  The next step after making the games would naturally be to return to India and do yet another round of testing.