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TopThemes In Previous Literature
The study of digital games in later life has been inspiring academic research for more than 30 years, as Weisman’s (1983) “Computer Games for the (Frail) Elderly” was possibly the first scholarly article on the topic. To develop the design framework that is proposed in this paper, I analyzed the literature on the topic of games and ageing in November 2014. While it was not the intention of this review to present an exhaustive meta-analysis, it did lead to a number of insights that would inform the eventual framework.
The search queried Medline/PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar and article reference lists, using the terms “games”, “gaming”, “play”, “older adults”, “seniors” and “elderly”. Duplicates were removed from the search results, as well as result that were irrelevant to the goals of this project. For example, some of the results used the term “seniors” to refer to high school students, and others used “play” to refer to the performance of a certain act. The review therefore excluded articles that studied sports, music, gambling, and any form of play that did not include references to digital games or technology.
Figure 1. Amount of publications in the sample, organized per decade from the 1980s until November 2014
The resulting sample of 265 articles indicated that the field was fairly small until 2006 as only 17 of the 265 articles (6.42%) were published before that year. While 2005 had only 1 article in the list, 2006 produced 3 articles (1.13%), while 2007 added 4 (1.50%), and 2008 contributed 16 publications (6.04%) (see Figure 1).