Research / Emotional challenge and meaningful play

Full paper · 2025

Emotionally Challenging Games Can Satisfy Older Adults' Psychological Needs: From Empirical Study to Design Guidelines

Zhou, M., Peng, X., Liu, B., Denisova, A., Barathi, S. C., Li, Z., Xie, X., Huang, J., & Tian, F.

ConferenceCORE A*Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'25), 2025

Five design guidelines for emotionally challenging games for older adults: meaningful choices, life experiences, uplifting narratives, fitting challenge and participatory design.
Open full-size image

In short

Retirement and living alone can make it harder for older adults to meet their psychological needs. We studied whether emotionally challenging games could help, first with a commercial game (Detroit: Become Human) and then with a game scenario designed for older adults.

The game in the study

The game scenario of “Old Li”, a self-designed game. Playing as Old Li, the player hears that his friend Lao Wu was deceived, meets Lao Wu, and discovers that his son Xiao Li was the fraudster. The player then makes a meaningful choice: report Xiao Li (A) or harbour him (B), followed by a second choice in each branch. A character relationship diagram shows Old Li, his son Xiao Li, his best friend Lao Wu, and Lao Wu’s sister Yingzi.
The game scenario of “Old Li”, a self-designed game: the player, as Old Li, decides whether to report his son Xiao Li, and each branch leads to a second meaningful choice. © Min Zhou

Key findings

  • Playing a commercial emotionally challenging game gave older adults a range of meaningful psychological experiences.
  • In the custom scenario, meaningful choices significantly increased players' sense of autonomy.
  • We propose five guidelines for designing emotionally challenging games for older adults.

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Zhou, M., Peng, X., Liu, B., Denisova, A., Barathi, S. C., Li, Z., Xie, X., Huang, J., & Tian, F. (2025, April). Emotionally Challenging Games Can Satisfy Older Adults' Psychological Needs: From Empirical Study to Design Guidelines. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'25) (pp. 1-19).

More on this topic