Comparison of game experience and preferences between young and elderly

With an increasingly aging population, currently, Taiwan has become an aging society. Because of cognitive decline in the elderly, many brain training games target this population. But there is few researches focus on investigating game player's experience and preference of the elderly. In this study, our primary purpose is to develop and design brain training games as an intermediary to explore the differences of response speed and memory between elderly and youth. In this study, three brain training games are designed and developed by us. There are a 2D shooting game, a color sequence game and a card matching game. Two age group (young and old) and three types of game (training for response speed, training for memory and training for hybrid of both) constituting a 2 × 3 mixed factorial design are investigated. In total, 125 participants were randomly selected, and they are separated into two age groups-young (N=86) and old (N=39). Experimental results show that no matter what types of games-training for speed, training for memory or training for hybrid of both, young people get better performance than the aged and they all reach a significant difference. The survey results indicated that 2D shooting game is loved by most of old people (reached 82%). The main reason is easy to play-player only need to control the up, down, right, left and fire keys, and has no psychological burden. In other words, no memory pressure and no time limit pressure are the key factors in design popular games for elderly. However, young group is more like the color sequence game than others (41.9%). Since the playing type and design of color sequence game is different with most of the normal games. Finally, the brain age reference diagrams for the three developed games are proposed. Players can use these diagrams to understand their capability with respect to young and old group.