Research And Implementation Of Game Design For Chinese Seniors

Recently aging issues have got more and more attention in the process of China stepping into aging society. When growing older, cognitive capacities of the elderly people decrease gradually, quantity of senior citizens with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has become larger day by day; furthermore, researches have shown that senior patients with MCI get an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or dementia when compared with similarly aged individuals. Besides medical treatment, various Reminiscence Therapy (RT) methods have been proven to be effective in terms of exercising cognitive capacities, as well as improving their physiological and psychological state.In this paper, we focused on the game design theory for elderly people with reminiscence therapy, based on their physiological and psychological changes, and developed the general principals on seniors’ game designing. Then, we chose once mandated government food stamps, which were dominant in China from1960s to1980s, as the backdrop, designed and implemented a reminiscence therapy game on Android tablet for elderly people in China. With the following usability test and experiment on the generated game records, we aim to prove that this kind of reminiscence therapy game can not only bring entertainment to the elderly people, but also help them exercise their cognitive capacities, such as memory ability, learning, comprehension, thinking and judgment etc. accordingly, defer the attenuation of cognitive capacities and delay the development of potential Alzheimer’s disease, and eventually dementia.