The paper “Promoting Family Play through Asymmetric Game Design”, authored by LASIGE’s Phd Students Pedro Pais and David Gonçalves and integrated members André Rodrigues and Tiago Guerreiro, in collaboration with Kathrin Gerling from KIT and Teresa Romão from NOVA LINCS, was published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction journal and will be presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference (CSCW 2024), in the next November.

The work focuses on promoting family play through asymmetric and asynchronous design. Family members often have constraints to play together, such as disparate skills (e.g., some might play only casual games while others play skill-demanding ones) and different availabilities (e.g., some might have 6 hours of free time to play while others only play during work breaks). The work asks “How can we create experiences that family members can share and cater to their different needs?” by designing a testbed game that was played by six pairs of adult-child family members. The results showcase how asymmetric, asynchronous experiences can be leveraged to create novel gaming experiences that meet the differing requirements of family play. The work also discusses how interdependent progress can be designed to promote real-world interactions, creating pervasive conversational topics that permeate the family routine.

The paper is available here