Beyond Ageism: Exploring VR Games for an Older Audience

[Music] so hey GDC thanks for coming um I'm Bob dut I'm a Belgian game designer I'm professor at Miami University of Ohio um and I'm currently working on a game called brookal about my World War II surviving grandmother but my main line of research that we'll be talking about today concerns uh games and aging now you might know me from such previous GDC talks as um Beyond agism designing meaningful games for older adults and well I really only did that one so um but that was last year um so could you raise your hand if you were here last year so I have some idea all right thanks for coming back guys then sorry awesome thanks Jeremy love you man so um all right so today we're going to do this the sequel really um to my talk from last year so um to give you a quick idea what I talked about back then um I basically summed up 12 years of research my own research out of others

as well in a 50-minute primer that thought you everything you needed to know to design great games for older audiences um well and in specifically this guy which is a picture of me if I'm you know older now um I crammed a lot of different topics in that talk and people really seem to like it especially Jeremy um but there was this one question that I really couldn't answer it was what about VR Bop and yeah what about it you see a lot of the material that I talk about comes from Academia um and to be honest there were a lot of articles with the term VR in the title um but all of them were by very ambitious academics who use the term to refer to things such as um the Nintendo Wii the Microsoft Connect um even Dance Dance Revolution inspired Dance games for seniors yeah that actually exists um so technically that's not really incorrect to talk about VR um to refer to these things because they all simulate your presence in a virtual environment but they're obviously not the latest and greatest consumer VR that had got everybody so excited about last year so all things

considered last year there wasn't really that much literature on audiovisual VR games uh for older adults out there and that obviously meant that I really couldn't you give you my opinion on the topic since I do need some supporting research to do so after all despite the many clear similarities I'm not a counselor to our president and while there's definitely some opinion in this talk I don't deal in alternative facts all right so all joking aside we're a year along since den and my team has conducted some informal test an exploratory study a lit review we asked around in the industry and I've been able to update last year's stock for VR so let's get started and talk about VR for older audiences so last year I started to talk uh revealing how older adults as in 50 plus year olds are going to be a huge segment of the gaming market and I got that from making a projection I combined numbers from the United Nations and the Pew uh Research Center which is a nonpartisan think than and I made a bold claim that by 2045 we could see see up to 105 million us

Gamers over the age of 50 now that claim is still supportable today uh Pew did a new study and they found that players over 65 even went up from 24 to 25% and the United Nations didn't release any new numbers now these demographics are about games obviously they're not about VR so again what about VR Bob well that's still pretty much up in the air um I only found data about older adults being interested in VR which doesn't really specify games um and it kind of makes s if you think of it because the technology is still so new so anyway I got these two surveys um U visit reported that 14% of 65 wants to try um VR and Touchstone research report that 64% of baby boomers are interested in VR now these numbers are clearly pretty far apart um but I'm leaning towards the ladder and I'm going to go on limb here and state that I think that the interest is definitely there um I personally found it way easier to convince older adults in my own research to play the VR games than that it was for them to play

the regular games and I've been doing this for a couple years um for reasons such as folks you know having seen it on television or they might have seen VR uh ages ago and wanted to see how it evolved or a lot of people just wanted to impress their grandkids and so on so um that's one reason why I think that there's definitely an initial interest for VR games there a second reason um is a report by slice intelligence that I saw um these guys are actually sponsoring the GDC and have a booth here as well um and they had a sample of 70,000 buyers of Pokémon go vers virtual Goods um and 20% of those 70,000 people were older than 55 so I know it's not VR it's it's AR but um in my opinion it does show that a somewhat similar technology can find an older audience successfully and more importantly an older audience that's willing to pay for it so considering the demographics when looking at PC games and mobile games there is definitely a substantial audience of uh 50 plus year olds and I do see some indications that this will grow into U VR audience in the same way that we see with younger audiences

however for developers creating VR games the key question here today is how do we go from an older audience that likes non-vr games to one that is in VR as well so looking into the research that my team has been doing I think we've got a pretty good idea of how to achieve this and frankly comes down to two items that will be familiar to the people who saw my talk last year the first one is access um last year I actually talked about accessibility instead but I'm using access here as an um umbrella term for Concepts as accessibility but also learning control and safety um VR employs relatively new ways of controlling games so these factors play a bigger role uh than they did last year for non-vr games um then there's content um that's similar to last year I also discussed there how to make games for R dos that are meaningful that are interesting and that are um perceived as useful to them and then finally my third category is new um it's context and this um because uh the both previous factors for rely heavily on on on social

parameters I felt that I should emphasize that and I turned into a third section so uh we're going to explore um all three of these and hopefully provide you with everything you need at this time to make great VR games for older adults so let's start with access so first some Hardware notes I guess um obviously VR Hardware differ significantly and not all the recommendations that I'm going to make today apply to each of these systems in fact uh in my lab we tried out the gear VR the Oculus Rift DK2 and the HTC V with older adults so far um that being said when it comes to the hardware itself we only ran into two minor issues the first one being um with regards to the Gear VR um a few participants had poor ey site uh and we couldn't offer them a solution to see clearly in the device um their glasses were either too big or um the optical adjustments weren't strong enough and we were kind of caught in between those so that's an issue that might occur with other headsets as well but in the tests we did

it only happened with the gear VR so thought it was interesting to mention um second um most of the participants that came into the lab were expecting something way more lightweight than what we currently have on offer um and something that's much more easy to use as well so modern-day headsets feel kind of bulky to them especially the room sized ones and while it wasn't huge issues for reasons that I'll explain in a bit um we did get some complaints about it and I think um it might get in the way of some people you know investing in a VR system at this point in time now moving from Hardware to software though um all of the systems that we tested led to a number of recommendations that pertain to how our balance our vision our hearing and our skills change as we age so let's look at these and I'll start with balance because a lot of VR seems to be heading towards embodied experiences so balance is basically a function of three uh things you got your propri reception which is your unconscious sense of where the different parts are your body are in relation to each other there's a vestibular system in your inner ear that provides you with a sense of balance and spatial Orient ation and there's vision

and well you guys are all using it right now so I'm sure you are aware what that is so um these three put together allow us to move through spaces without falling over but when they're at a sink we tend to feel nauseous for example if your vision sees movement then your vestibular system doesn't pick up any um you might experience simulation sickness that VR developers have been working so hard on to avoid over the past years now I'm not going to get into simulation sickness in this stock at all I think it has been documented well and there's many ways to avoid or circumvent um in particular the things that you'll see on this slide um yeah so um with that being said obviously there's way more to it than just these five bullet points um and I recommend reading the link um at the bottom which is an article by Ben Lewis Evans on gamma Sutra that goes into depth in this topic now for older adults though um we need to look further than this um and we need to be aware of the following so proprtion well your nerve density in your peripheral nervous system starts to decline in your 40s

um the nerves in your vestibular system decline around 55 um and a lot of people will start to get Vision issues um minor ones at first um after 40 you take all that you combine it with your response times already um being on the client after you hit 25 years old um and you can imagine that well as soon as you hit your 40s you will see a steady decline in balance test and your balance will just um doriate because of it um so to compensate for this older adults rely more on their Vision than on their appropriate SEPTA system and as you all know vision is the thing that we're really going to be messing with when we're making VR experiences for them so here is what I suggest we do um the easiest one of course is allow for people to sit down uh we tried that in our lab it worked marvelously um we just gave him a chair with wheels at the bottom not a wheelchair but just a chair with tiny little wheels and it works fine for room siiz F like the Vive we had people drive a chair through Paris and they loved it um that being said though I think we need to look as an industry look into how we can bring

assisted devices into VR you know if the five tracker can BR bring in a gun or a baseball bat well why not a walking cane um and then finally design for spotters um we helped with the cable management for our participants or provided them an arm to hang on to if they needed it um so keep in mind that older adults might need somebody else with them in the space to actually enjoy what you're developing for them so that's uh my first point second um not everybody can duck lean and kneel efficiently like a younger person good so the Fantastic Contraption actually does an excellent job with this by allowing players to scale the game world and play it in a less embodied way um in the standard scale we had a lot of issues with our participants just getting down on the floor and trying to BU you know build the Contraptions for the puzzles um but moving at the desk scale fixed a lot of these issues so um yeah readjusting the scale can be very helpful and then I have three recommendations that were less relevant in the short desks that we did but that you will see if you have people play for a longer period of time first of all try

to avoid movements that require balance shifting because well that's asking for trouble obviously um second Implement enough resting time to accommodate fatigue um I'll have a comment about that later in the talk as well but um you know if you do an embodied game you get way more tired than when you're using a controller and um recommend that players use a hard surface we have a hard surface in the lab but if you're playing on a carpet it's easier for you to sway and fall over um so those are my recommendations for balance and that will help us avoid any nasty Falls hopefully um let's look at Vision hearing cognition and some other things um if you remember last year's stock the reason why this is important is because survey showed that between 35 and 50% of 65 plus year olds um reported disability so this is a huge Market segment really and they need some adjustments to play VR games so for vision um well a lot of the recommendations I made in last year's stock actually just carry over just apply to VR as well like larger font sizes harder higher contrasts all these things are still very welcome the specific recommendation that we we saw is um with devices like the gear VR you

know if if you can't see really well you can sit closer to a screen but that's difficult to do is if the screen is stationary in front of you so um allowing options so that people can get closer to menus to menus and to objects are are really helpful um for hearing again a lot of optimizations uh like the ones we have for non-vr games make sure you're in the right frequencies um adjust words per minute and so forth um but I think the biggest challenge for VR there are probably the subtitles um now I'm not going to get into the details of um how this work but if you just use typical subtitles like you'd have in a movie it becomes very disorienting in VR um so the best solution that I've seen so far I think is the one that you have in F tutorial um they give each character a speech bubble and if you combine that with a visual indicator of where people need to look um I think that's probably the best thing that we've got so far until we see a better solution for it so finally we've got cognition and other adjustments um and a lot of these things come down to allowing for customization from non-vr

games we have adjustments for slower reaction speeds or adjusting your input controls um and for VR well if you're using motion controls allow older adults to customize how much Le leeway there is in uh the game's motion input because they might need very coarse movements or they might have a tremble that you don't want to interfere with their input anyways um there's another gamma Sutra article that goes into depth on all these topics if you'd like some additional information for it so most of these recommendations are about adjusting the interface to meet the abilities of your players and that brings me to a point that I made last year as well um you should always think about adjusting the interface but never to challenge just look at this guy all right I would not want to pick a fight with that guy and neither do you want to give him a less challenging version of the game just cuz he looks older than most of you do in this room um that's one of the reasons why the talk is called Beyond agism there's no

reason why you shouldn't expect older adults to be willing to get into a full contact zombie battle in VR um so agees not necessarily make somebody frail or boring um so there are plenty of older adults who are still capable of getting into something like this so I always say adjust the interface but please don't dumb down the challenge that you're providing and that was actually my Golden Rule last year with regards to accessibility however for VR I feel that I needed a different Golden Rule um and this since it's new technology it is extremely important that you inform your audience what to expect for example for more physical VR games you want to be careful with the Motions that you're requesting of players as injuries can happen so it's essential that you indicate what these motions are going to be so people can make inform decisions before they buy your game and they really know what they're getting themselves into um of course that also means informing caregivers um and that brings me to a short anecdote from the study that we did uh as we happen to have two people with mild cognitive impairment um which is an early stage of

Dementia in our sample now we didn't notice and neither did our caregivers until we noticed how they couldn't differentiate um between the real world and the VR World which if you think of it's really scary because all of a sudden there's a real tyrannosaurus rex right in front of you um so we cut the demo short obviously but this is something to be mindful of because um well there's a lot of ethical considerations with that and MCI seems to show up even more so um in VR games than in regular games so those are my um comments for Access um let's have a look at content and I'd like to open that topic by addressing usefulness because if you think of games that are useful for old adults you probably think of the brain games and the exra games and if you were here last year I really went on a rant about how brain training games are ages because they're focusing on the negative side of aging and they exploit stereotypes and fear of Aging for profit now this argument can obviously be made for exer games as well and um well the link down below refers to review the research on extra gaming for older adults is

currently still in conclusive we don't have enough evidence to demonstrate that they work very well so with that being said though I do want to point out that one older adults care a whole lot about spending their time in a useful Manner and to perceived usefulness for any audience is an extremely important Concept in why people adopt new technologies which is what we're dealing here right now so my suggestion is here that as an industry it's all about thinking about how we can make exert games and brain games that are not exploiting these things or using these stereotypes and I think that's something we could reasonably do um for example when I had older adults try a space by trainer which is awesome um many of them commented on how good of a workout it was and the headset would just be covered in sweat when we took it off now I can't academically back it up that this is a good exercise for all the adults but getting people to move and doing uh exercise that they usually wouldn't do is not really a bad idea I would argue so um here is my Approach on how to lever usefulness as a design goal for older adults and I talked about this

last year as well um this is what I see in my research a whole lot older adults request Innovative gameplay thought-provoking themes emotional uh meaningful dialogue and aesthetic experiences um or like one person on Twitter Put It games that are really fun and that's exactly what a lot of games that are designed for older adults are often still lacking so let's explore some of the things that I saw in the games that we tested with older adults in terms of their content and maybe this will inspire someone out there to make awesome extra games so let's start with the number one VR experience for older adults that's currently out there it's Google Earth VR um and now I know according to your definition not a game Bop well according to mine Google Earth VR is an exploration sandbox borderline VR game experience and every older adult that we tested this with would loved it now aside from the obvious usefulness and educational value what makes this so interesting in my opinion is that it's a reminiscing machine like nothing I've ever seen

before um and reminiscing actually has a whole lot of positive health effects for older adults so the take way here is that just by looking and exploring places especially familiar ones we actually have a very useful and meaningful mechanic for this audience um now that being said this test was not all positive though the interface was still really cumbersome for people with little game experience and they struggled a whole lot to move around I actually had to put some people on the non-interactive welcome tour of the software and they did enjoy that tremendously but you know then you take that interactivity out of it um so perhaps there is an opportunity there for a guided tour VR thing for older adults maybe I don't know U and that brings me to a specific VR genre I guess um I call it looking around games um and by this I mean experiences that are just about being somewhere else whether it's seeing a dinosaur come to live in Jurassic world demo or visiting a c solay show or seeing a blue whale pass by just looking around works as a great mechanic for this audience a um and from my experience the cream of the crop

would be games like dumpy goinging Elephants or sideline the chair where your gaze is actually how you interact with the world um for example sideline the chair you know the game changes um in the places where you're not looking and my older adults uh mentioned that a whole lot as well um a lot of them mentioned that it was way more fun um if there's some sort of an interaction in these games whether it's just the environment responding to your presence like fish swimming away if you get to cloes in the blue um moving on another Dem that was really successful is this one in um the lab by Valve um you get to play fetch with a robot dog and that worked so well I mean when I did it I got bored of it after five minutes but my older adults just could do this for very long times and I was really surprised at how much they got out of it so the takeaway here is that building a social connection with a virtual or maybe real life character is another mechanic that seems to work really well furthermore when we think about learning VR games this gameplay is extremely familiar and people figure it out uh without needing any instr instruction so I would argue that designing for

recognition is a great way to get older adults to learn your game faster for example um in the Fantastic Contraption um to move from one mode to the next all you do is you pick up a helmet and you put it on your head and since it's a helmet oh yeah this is something I put on my head in the lap itself it's just a sphere and it's the same interaction but just putting a sphere on your head or putting a helmet on your head is completely different than the amount of you know help we have to provide older adults to figure out how the interface actually works so recognition is really important and these are my four main takeaways that work for every older adult that um we um tested with so exploring places reminiscing social interaction and recognition are important now these are all recommendations for a general older audience when I got my um experienced group of older Gamers the Oxford adle Gamers Club in the mix the design space just opened up and the most popular game for that group was the Brook Haven experiment so a really tense zombie shooter game now I do admit um in the

test that we did we didn't have any female players come in sometimes we have them sometimes we don't um so this might be a little bit gender biased but the older adults that we tested these games with want something more action oriented and Brook Haven was a hit um they liked that it felt like an actual game and that's a com that I've heard a couple of times while a lot of the VR things didn't really feel as much as a game and they like to shoot and kill things um whether it was the archery game that you'll find in the lab the slingshot you'll find in the lab or um space pirate trainer these this is a mechanic that works for um an older gamer audience now obviously I tried some other games as well um but I was really disappointed with how it turned out I had such high expectations but job Simulator the Fantastic Contraption they liked them for a while and they certainly got some laughs out of it but um they didn't really want to keep playing it like they did with the shooting games and they felt in particular that the the art style was too weird and too childish so um a more

lifelike art style like what you'll see involves the lab works fine but when you go into the really cartoony stuff it's kind of off ping for 60 plus year olds I guess so um yeah those are my notes I have on content um which brings us to context um now I'm nearing the end of the uh the talk here and we've actually already discussed a lot of social factors for example I talked about how spotters can help you make a game playable how interaction really matters i h at the importance of intergenerational play or how you want to inform caregivers about what to expect in a game um and aside from that it really comes down to designing games that fit in the daily lives and the life history of older adults um and I would argue that there are very few differences there between VR games and non-vr games so I addressed all of these uh pretty extensively in the talk last year more specifically um we looked at five different motivational profiles we looked at how you can extend MDA with aesthetic specifically for this audience we looked at the life history boxes the

cost Ben the cost benefits analysis of play and how intelligence changes so instead of just doing a complete rehash I decided to provide you with a link of uh my talk last year on the wrap-up slide and simply get to my conclusion so in conclusion I do see a bright future for VR for older adults um the way I think of it VR is a transformative technology um similar to the internet or a smartphone it's it's definitely going to change how we do a whole lot of things and it's drastically going to change how we age um correspondently I see a lot of opportunities for playful VR activities and games aimed at older adults um similar to non-vr games but we have to be really mindful of their specific needs and wishes and we still have a pretty long way to go to accomplish that we're basically just at the beginning of this obviously so thanks so much for having me if you like the talk please fill out the review forms and I guess I'm ready for questions then thank [Music]

you question sure what what would you think would differ for hollow environment well um with the hollow lands at this point well I haven't tested it at all with them so it's it's a really hard question to answer CU I hate just talking from my own experiences um for an yeah I don't think I've got a good answer for that question at this point actually I think I really need to test it um yeah I'm just going to stay on the safe side of that one sorry how about how about um human factors ergonomics and hygiene have you looked at any of those in particular um well in our lab we typically look more into the content and go uh more in the accessibility for ergonomics I think it comes down to the things that I mentioned mentioned with the kneeling and all those things in the accessibility part of it those are the

things that we could perceive we don't do any formal standardized testing on those things um you know with hygiene we we wipe off the headsets and everything because there's a lot of sweat often times um especially with things like the space bar trainer um so yeah that's go ahead um great talk thank you so much uh I was wondering about about how long onboarding tended to take in terms of sort of bringing someone an older adult up the speed on how VR um how the VR application was going to work could you repeat that CU I uh yeah sorry um just about onboarding how long it took uh an older adult to get familiar with the hardware VR and sort of what what that about how long that took you a question yeah so um how long does it take for them to pick these things up basically um well we always provide some assistance obviously but um I I have to say Val does a really good job with that tutorial um so we typically had them run run through that first and after that

tutorial they need a little bit help left and right but it it was way easier than what we get with most uh video games um non VR games now with um say the gear VR we had some extensive training for them um so you know we had like like a protocol on how you put this thing on and everything and we made sure that they're at ease and all that kind of stuff so um because that was also part of a research study so we had to do that so um with the gear VR um the the interface on the site could be a little tricky it take him a while to actually just find that thing um but outside of that I don't think we saw too many issues like I said earlier I mean it's just they get good instructions because we you know like I said we're looking for Content more than we are um testing the hardware itself I'd say well thank you oh you're welcome hi again great talk thank you so much I guess I have an observation slash question um throughout my career in Tech not just in games uh co-workers refer to Grandma like we

want an interface that Grandma can use or saying well we're not looking for Grandma to play this game um also I would observe that um in articles that we see and even in parts of your talk today they're very stereotypically older looking adults right uh who actually look more like 70 and 75 right uh younger people might say wow look at the funny clothes the golf outfits how wrinkly they are the white hair and so on wow they're probably frail and tremble and stuff but I think that distances us developers from them that makes them more other um and I just wonder what your thoughts are on that my point of view is coming from that of a user experienced designer and user Advocate who is 52 years old and so I see a little bit of distancing and I also see kind of a gap

there between the 20s somethings and 30s somethings who make games in this notion that all these people are white-haired and frail right right yeah know I completely agree um well first off in respon you know with the visuals that are in the talk I can obviously not use our actual participants for their anonymity and privacy so I just pick things of the internet and you do tend to get you know a very stereotypical image that way um it's just really hard to avoid um but with that in mind yeah I think last year I was talking about only 1% of the industry is over 50 um it's you know I I think there's definitely a disconnect there often times we try to we do things at Miami where we bring our students in on workshops where they have to design things intergenerationally I think that helps a lot for the students that do that um just it's you know the distance just becomes a lot lot smaller when you actually have to collaborate on some with somebody and make something that will work for both of you um so so yeah those are my thoughts on that does that

answer you great go ahead hi I'm I'm 72 uh the um uh this hasn't really turned into as you've pointed out real well into a mass market yet any additional thoughts on how to reach the uh uh seniors for a younger generation it's easy they're reading gamer magazines they're they're right in the middle of all that how how do you reach the uh senior population other than taking out massive ads and AARP yeah yeah well the ARP actually um came up to me at some point saying they have a lot of people on the website looking for games specifically I mean they actually see this in this in their Search terms apparently excuse me but um what I see with um many older adults is um that their online diet is slightly different there are still a lot of people who use forums to look for games while younger audiences typically you know use things like Reddit um Facebook

works as well um I think for my own research it's always been easiest to find people through online communities to participate um let's see um well I had another one but it kind of escaped my mind for a second there um yeah well I think oh yeah the the biggest one actually that always works really well in my opinion for us to reach out to people is if you can get um their grandchildren to be really excited about something that they can do with their grandparents it is really easy to get them to play um and that's typically even when we recruit people for the Oxford at Old Gamers Club we will just put an announce out in some local magazines um that we know um are read by 60 plus year olds um and we'll typically say like look you want to know what your grand kiss are so excited about will teach you and that helps us a whole lot

with getting people to come over and try things out but that's more at a local level I think um in an international level um um online communities seem to be still the best way to do it and there are actually some online communities that are specifically tailored towards older adults that play video games um there's an Australian website called the older gamer.com I've used that for my own research a couple of times as well all right any more questions great well I guess we're done here then thanks so much [Applause] guys