Digital games that are worth playing by older people are a new type of digital games that can reinforce and exploit the strengths of older people as individuals and game players rather than merely compensating for their limitations, reduce isolation and foster socialisation, both offline and online, and improve the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of older people. The research conducted in the WorthPlay project aims to enable an understanding and development of these types of digital games, and is grounded in ethnography, participatory and iterative design, and experiences of digital game play. This research will be conducted within the context of designing, developing and evaluating a prototype of an online game that is worth playing by older people, by involving and engaging in the research a user group consisting of older people of mixed gender and expertise playing games, and relevant members of their social circles. WorthPlay will take the state of the art of human-computer interaction research with older people and digital games forward by producing a human taxonomy of digital games for older people; providing a deeper understanding of everyday digital game by older people, of the challenges and opportunities of emerging human-game interaction styles and gaming platforms to improve the accessibility and playability of digital games for older people, and their physical and psychosocial wellbeing, of game adaptation to individual users, and of cultural similarities and differences in digital game play. WorthPlay will also improve relevant methodological aspects of human-computer interaction research with older people by looking into ethnography, user engagement, and iterative and participatory design, in out-of-laboratory conditions over extended periods of time. WorthPlay will also develop a pipeline to integrate the technology and research created during the project into marketable outcomes, and develop original methods of marketing digital games to the older population.

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The main objective of this project is to explore the emergent scientific space generated
by the intersection of three different paradigms dedicated to the study of
self-organizing mechanisms in social systems: prehistoric etno-anthropology and
social anthropology, experimental economics, and multiagent systems.

The project aims to study the mechanisms of self-organization in societies where it does
not exist a centralized control mechanism and where the institutional level is
almost inexistent.

We will study the mechanisms in charge of self-organization and distributed
social control (as it is the case of reputation) that generate social norms in
human societies and that can be easily applicable to virtual environments,
either entirely populated by artificial entities (autonomous agents) or virtual
societies, where both humans and virtual agents coexist.

The work developed should serve as a guide to treat similar research topics
where the behaviour of a group of individuals responds to the individual
adoption of certain social conventions. This research can lead to three
different and complementary paths: (i) a theoretical work where different
social coordination mechanisms are identified by using the models and
simulations suggested in this project; (ii) an instrumental work where the methodology
and tools developed under this project are refined to build a technological
corpus for social scientists; (iii) and finally, the application of several
mechanisms for social coordination and the technological corpus in virtual
communities as the integration of web services, ubiquitous and pervasive
computing applications, and the online gaming applications.