Workshopping with the Acculturative Game Design Framework

A pilot workshop applying the Acculturative Game Design (AGD) Framework to Latine participants sought to generate serious game concepts that could reduce acculturative stress and improve communication between generations. The study's motivation rests on elevated rates of psychiatric distress among U.S.-born Latine youth and LGBTQ+ individuals, combined with the argument that games grounded in Self-Determination Theory may offer a useful intervention channel. The work is positioned primarily as a conceptual and content-design exploration rather than a tested intervention, with prototype development deferred to future research.

The workshop enrolled 14 participants aged 18 to 34, predominantly first-generation and largely from California, and was conducted over Zoom with a Miro board and analyzed through inductive thematic coding. Findings were organized across the framework's five categories, covering intergenerational relationships, communication strategies, main game mechanics, and the three self-determination needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Across groups, participants converged on values including open-mindedness, mutual effort, trust, and respect, along with a preference for combining direct and technology-mediated indirect communication, customizable experiences, and structured flexibility.

The resulting concepts, five in total, included a family rocket-building game, a low-stakes family communication app, a Jeopardy-style intergenerational game, and Animal Crossing-style shared family worlds. A recurring conclusion was the need for accessible, customizable designs that accommodate varying levels of technology comfort across age groups. The authors judge the framework promising for bridging intergenerational and cultural gaps, while acknowledging that the single, time-limited workshop constrains the depth and generalizability of the results. Because the outputs are qualitative design ideas rather than tested interventions, their value lies chiefly in generating hypotheses for subsequent empirical development.