Designing Serious Games for Children and Adolescents: What Developmental Psychology Can Teach Us

Digital games are part and parcel of young people’s lives today. Using data from several recent studies conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Roberts and Foehr (2008) report that 50% of households with children younger than 6 years and 83% of households with children 8 to 18 years of age have a game console. Not surprisingly, children spend considerable amounts of time playing these games-in 2004, 8-to 10-year-olds played for 65 minutes per day and 15-to 18-year-olds played for 33 minutes per day. Within this context, Sherry and Dibble’s chapter (this volume, chapter 10) presents a timely review of the research on the relation between digital games and development. Unfortunately, we are severely limited in the conclusions that we can draw from these studies. A limited number of studies on a topic, a small number of subjects in those studies, with only a few of them focusing on children-these are only some of the problems with this body of work. Regardless, what we learn from the chapter is that digital game playing does have an effect on a variety of dimensions including physiological measures, attentional processes, and learning. It is the expectation of such effects that has fueled the serious games movement.