Using Player Personas in Game Design for Children with Autism

This extended abstract, presented at the Chinese DiGRA 2018 conference, argues that player personas can be an effective design tool for games aimed at children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), particularly when children cannot reliably articulate their own needs and direct playtesting with them is time-consuming and potentially uncomfortable. The authors contrast their approach with conventional data-driven persona creation, such as the player-metrics method proposed by Canossa and Drachen, by building personas from expert interviews with speech therapists and other practitioners, supplemented by a literature review.

The persona development process identified recurring sensitivities to sound and touch, repetitive behaviors, and circumscribed interests, which were then clustered into three personas: one centered on self-stimulatory behavior, one on social anxiety, and one on aggressive behavior. These personas guided decisions about game mechanics, navigation, and interaction with touchscreen hardware, and were checked against testing sessions with real participants, with descriptions refined after each round of observation and questionnaires. The authors report that this approach reduced reliance on direct involvement of target players during early evaluation, kept sessions focused on the product rather than background knowledge, and gave a multidisciplinary team shared, higher-level design goals.

The scope of the work is narrow and qualitative: it describes a single research project rather than providing quantitative evidence, and no sample sizes or measured outcomes are reported. Its contribution is therefore best understood as a methodological proposal for designing games for an audience with limited prior research, with effectiveness supported mainly by the authors' reported experience rather than systematic validation.