Participatory Game Design to Engage a Digitally Excluded Community

This paper examines a participatory design project in which young people aged 11 to 19 from Lancaster and Manchester, both communities identified as digitally and socially excluded, co-designed a location-based mobile game to explore their sense of place and belonging. The authors argue that participatory design, with its emphasis on trust-building, play-based methods, prototyping, and sensitivity to participants' lives, offers a promising but demanding approach for engaging disengaged groups. The work situates the digital divide within broader socio-economic, educational, and cultural disadvantage, noting that digitally excluded individuals are often also socially disadvantaged, and it contends that existing research offers little guidance on participatory game design with such communities.

The central finding concerns the time and effort required before any design work can begin. A researcher spent roughly three months building rapport with a Lancaster youth group, and relationship-building consumed much of the early project timeline. The resulting group of nine participants, all male, with six girls who showed little interest, co-designed a game called marshOtron, a grid-based light-cycle variant built on Nokia N8 phones using GPS and a game server. The male group's ideas centred on physical chase mechanics, while the female group had limited gaming experience and was more drawn to Facebook access. Playtesting at Lancaster University exposed GPS and connectivity limitations that shaped the grid-based final design.

The 2011 trial, built in Flash Lite 4.0 with a custom J2ME app for capturing GPS data, showed players typically engaging actively for 10 to 15 minutes per game and adapting the physical map to match the phone display. Participants initially struggled with GPS latency but managed it once familiar, though the game required supervision and prior understanding. The authors report strong participant ownership in the final April 2011 trials with a Manchester group but provide no quantitative engagement or outcome data, and they conclude that sustained trust-building and iterative participatory design are critical to engaging such communities.