The paper “Exploring Asymmetric Roles in Mixed-Ability Gaming”, co-authored by LASIGE’s David Gonçalves (who has recently completed his masters’), André Rodrigues e Tiago Guerreiro (both integrated researchers) has been accepted for presentation and publication as part of the 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’21), a top-ranked (CORE A*) conference, and the premier international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is also co-authored by researchers Mike Richardson, Alexandra de Sousa and Michael Proulx (all from the Comparative Crossmodal Cognition Collective, University of Bath). The collaboration was partially funded by the INPLAY project.

In the paper the authors explore ability-based asymmetric roles as a design approach to create engaging and challenging mixed-ability play. The team designed and developed two collaborative testbed games exploring asymmetric interdependent roles. In a remote study with 13 mixed-visual-ability pairs we assessed how roles affected perceptions of engagement, competence, and autonomy, using a mixed-methods approach. The games provided an engaging and challenging experience, in which differences in visual ability were not limiting. The results underline how experiences unequal by design can give rise to an equitable joint experience.