Improving Co-play Between Parents and Children in a Roblox Game

Sammanfattning: Co-play of digital games between parents and their children is a beneficial but underutilized media mediation strategy. Previous research on this topic has resulted in various design recommendations meant to support and encourage co-play. However, many of these design recommendations have not been applied and validated by subsequent research endeavors which created co-play focused games. This project endeavors to address this research gap by following prevalent design recommendations in an attempt to improve the co-play experience of an existing Roblox digital game, Funomena’s Magic Beanstalk. This was accomplished by employing a subset of applicable design recommendations to redesign two of Magic Beanstalk’s mini-games. The redesigned mini-games were evaluated by parent-child dyads in a qualitative evaluation, comparing the co-play experience of the original and redesigned games. The evaluation found that the new mini-games engendered an overall better co-play experience in comparison to the original mini-games.