Summary Response Week 11: Free Play Over Distance

CPSC 601.25 Week 11 Part 1

Papers

In this response I will discuss one paper which considers a system for supporting 'free play' for children over video conference.

Free Play

Children develop normally when they interact and play with others in an unstructured and active way. The authors of the paper call this process "learning sociocultural and emotional competencies". In spite of this language, the concept of free play is open to anyone from their own childhood. The authors suggest that this time is being cut into by television, which is interesting as time spent watching television seems to be decreasing for most groups. Since this free play is probably important to normal development, such as a decline might have implications for children.

The researchers tackle this problem by trying to find out if free play can be conducted over video conferencing systems. Since video conferencing systems were designed to allow people at work to communicate with people who it was not possible to see face to face, probably because the costs of travel, we can assume some cost or force is stopping parents from (a) knowing and trusting other parents and (b) allowing their children to play with one another. The researcher suggest that maybe it would be possible to combine the benefits of free play for children with the convenience of leaving your kid in front of the TV for 12 hours a week.

Study

The researchers first conducted a pilot study using three pairs of kids with a pre-existing relationship, such as being friends or relatives. They used a pre-existing video conferencing system in a laptop and tv configuration. Being children they had difficulties understanding the technical problems associated with video conferencing such as visibility or audio problems. The boys preferred a large TV and the girls the laptop configuration.

The researchers then propose a more advanced set of conditions for testing distributed play, including higher fidelity video conference, pan and tilt cameras supporting by wizard of oz techniques and a 'shared rug' that children could play on. They recruited 26 pairs of friends to play together using the prototype system and coded the results of the interaction. The researchers do not carefully consider the impact of having the sessions done only once and in a laboratory setting.

They seemed to find that most of the problems with the system could just be resolved by increasing the fidelity of the video conferencing, as their 'vanilla option' seemed to be rated second only to face-to-face play. The projector rug, which appears somewhat dangerous from the picture, appeared to be confusing for some of the children, as it required distinguishing their own objects from the projected ones. The mobile condition was considered bad because children had to move and compose the view of their partner. It seems in general that visibility was a big difficulty because it requires a child to be aware of the (technology limited) visibility of another person.

Conclusion

Making children play over video conferencing seems like a strange idea. Years of effort by the HCI community and commercial products have not succeeded in make video conferencing a substitute for face to face meetings and in general remote work mediated by video conferencing is still difficult. It seems strange to expect that these problems would not be exacerbated by expecting children to use to the technology. The decline of free play for children is a serious social problem and attempting to solve it by technology like this seems silly and trivializing to the problem itself.