Co-smonauts: Game Interfaces for Elderly People in Co-located and Collaborative Play

This paper illustrates the impact of different game interface approaches for older persons in a collaborative and colocated setting. Concretely, we investigated if various touchbased and physical game interfaces influence the perceived enjoyment, the usability, and if certain interface solutions lower the barrier for the target player group to get into the game. In order to find answers to our research question, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a collaborative co-located game called “Co-smonauts”. Within the game, the older person serves as a navigator for a starship captain to aid him/her to complete the game missions. Via the experimental setting, the navigators were confronted with 3 variants of a game interface. Our study results illustrate that the slider-based game interface (both physical and digital) are very well-suited for older players.