Investigating motivational aspects of brazilian elderly to interact with digital games

Abstract

The increase in the number of world’s elderly people has encouraged the research about human-computer interaction relating to the elderly. Recent studies indicate that digital games could bring benefits to the elderly, such as cognitive stimulation and relaxation. These benefits can help prevent some types of diseases related to old age. However, very few elderly take advantage of these benefits because they do not aware of it and do not have reasons or abilities to play digital games. This work focuses on investigating what are the elements that may encourage (or not) elderly people to interact with digital games and may offer relevant insights to games developers to motivate this target audience. For this, we organized a workshop to conduct a qualitative study with elderlies. Our findings showed up some elderly preferences, which may be converted into new design characteristics, although some positive and negative motivations of elderly Brazilians related to digital games are similar to the ones of the elderly in developed countries, according to the related work.