Gamer Profile

Sydney is a five-and-a-half-year-old girl. She plays educational games on an iPad at school, but her time is monitored and limited to 20 minutes. She does not play video games at home, although she regularly asks her parents to buy her an iPad. The parents are trying to prolong her exposure to technology, especially at home, although they know that technology is a necessary part of our lives today. They are also concerned about the negative aspects of teens and social media, so they are trying to start early to minimize her access and exposure to mobile devices, to hopefully avoid the potential for technology or cell phone addiction. Because of this limitation at home, she loves going to the library where she can play educational games on their computers.

The library is where I initially observed her playing video games. She was observed, later, on a laptop. The library games start with a title screen containing several game options consisting of math-related games, building games and reading games. Since Sydney’s primary exposure to gaming is through an iPad at school, she interacted with the screen by leaning forward to touch the icon of the game she wanted to play. When this didn’t result in a change of the screen, she tried pushing random keys on the keyboard. Since she is a little younger than our specified age-range, and a novice, I eventually showed her the mouse. I was trying to give the least amount of influence, so that she could still interact with the game. I moved it with her hand on it while pointing to the arrow on the screen, to show her that’s how she had to interact with the game. She was able to move the mouse around and look at the screen, and point the mouse to an icon, but she just hovered there. After a while, I told her that she needed to click with the mouse to select or choose something on the screen. This posed another issue, because she continually clicked the right button on the mouse, bringing up a menu window. This was probably due to the way she held the mouse and the size of her hand, which put her fingers on the right side of the mouse, so I also showed her how to click the left button of the mouse. As a long-time Apple user, this brought back the memory of PC-users deriding Apple computers for only coming with a one-button mouse. Here, I thought how helpful it would be if these computers, which are geared towards children, only had a one-button mouse.

Once she had the mechanics of computer interaction through the mouse, she was better. She clicked through to a game about addition and another game involving building. There seemed like there might be some software issues going on with some of the games as there were periods of no response from the computer, even though she was clicking on items. Some games had a back arrow which would take her back to the game selection, but when the builder program seemed to stall, I intervened again to show her the escape key. I wasn’t sure if it would do anything, but it did take her back to the game selection, and from there she selected an interactive book. This is where she spent most of her time. And, she enjoyed that she could click on different characters on the screen and advance the story, or get reactions from them. However, after she had clicked on each character on the screen she got a little frustrated until she found the right pointing arrow at the bottom of the screen, and she was able to go to the next page of the story.

Throughout this experience she asked more questions than she narrated her actions, often saying “How can this work?” and “This is kind of complicated.” Later, we tried a puzzle game on my laptop. Once again, she tried to touch the screen to move pieces of the puzzle around, and I had to show her the trackpad as I had shown her the mouse. There’s another issue with having the hand grab the puzzle piece so that it can be moved, and I must eventually intervene to tell her to use the shift key. When she does, the hand makes a fist like it's grabbing the piece. From there, the only action narration I could get from her was “I’m taking this piece right here, and I’m now going to put the edges in the right order.” Then she said, “I never played with a real laptop,” and it was back to her questions: “Which one should I pick? Why are we missing pieces?”

After a while she says, “I think this puzzle is complicated.” I tell her that there are only four pieces right now, and I think we need some more pieces. I ask her if she wants to wait until we find more pieces, but she says no. She discovers the right shift key, and says, “There’s another one!” She presses the arrow keys and discovers that they, too, make the hand move around and says, “Look.” At one point she presses the caps lock key instead of shift, but after a while, when the hand does not change shape, she looks down and says, “Oh” and presses shift.

In conclusion, Sydney is a novice gamer, who is just learning the mechanics of gaming and the nature of human-computer-interaction. However, she has a strong urge to figure out how to interact with technology so that she can play games. Although I don’t own an iPad, it would be interesting to observe her on an iPad since she was so inclined to interact via a touchscreen.