Designing VR Games for Emotional Intelligence: Participatory Design Insights from Children

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) games offer promising opportunities for social and emotional learning (SEL) by simulating real-life social interactions that help children develop emotional intelligence (EI) skills (i.e., recognizing other’s and one’s own emotions, regulating emotions and responding appropriately to social situations). However, there is still limited research on how to design such VR games that effectively integrate SEL objectives with engaging gameplay. There are several design frameworks for non-VR games, including the Integrated Design Framework for Playful Learning (IDFPL). IDFPL provides guidance for designing learning experiences that balance engagement with educational outcomes through affective, behavioral, cognitive, and social-cultural dimensions of playful interaction. While IDFPL has been widely used for digital game-based learning contexts, its application to support EI skill development through VR games remains underexplored. To address this gap, our study explores how the IDFPL framework can inform the design of VR games that support EI development in children. We conducted 7 participatory design sessions with 20 children aged 7-14 years to design a VR game that helps the player recognize, interpret, and understand emotional cues. Following four dimensions of the IDFPL framework, we analyzed how and what type of playful learning elements children incorporated into their game designs. Our findings provide insights into how children conceptualize EI learning in VR gameplay and identify concrete design elements (i.e., multimodal emotional cues, sequential learning, guided interactions through characters and effort-based rewards) that can guide the development of immersive games for EI. Future research is required to investigate how these design elements can be incorporated into immersive VR environments and evaluate their impact on children’s EI development and SEL outcomes.