Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This study investigates the manner in which older adults play digital games, the types of problems that they encounter while playing, and the significance that they associate with the playing experience. A female in her seventies who was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) participated in an experiment in which she played a digital game (Reversi) on an Android tablet once a week. Each session lasted for one to one and a half hours, and the experiment was performed between April and August 2018. To date, she has played 322 games over a period of 16 days. Both her gameplay and utterances while playing were recorded, and her times and scores for each game were obtained from the recorded video. These results were further compared with those of an undergraduate student who played under similar conditions, which exhibited that the older participant required longer time for each game than that required by the student; further, the older participant found it difficult to understand the rules, especially during the early stages. However, her times and scores improved significantly with each session until her scores almost matched with those of the student. Qualitatively analyzing her utterances exhibited that she had set herself concrete numerical objectives and that she gradually set herself higher goals. Some barriers, such as advertisements that appeared unexpectedly and difficulties in using the tablet’s multi-touch functionality, were observed. In addition, the game had become her favorite and that she considered it to be an important activity.