Designing for Disengagement: Challenges and Opportunities for Game Design to Support Children's Exit From Play

Games research and industry have developed a solid understanding of how to design engaging, playful experiences that draws players in for hours and causes them to lose their sense of time. While these designs can provide enjoyable experiences, many individuals -- especially children -- may find it challenging to regulate their playing time, and often they struggle to turn off the game. In turn, this affords external regulation of children's playing behavior by limiting playing time or encouraging alternative activities, which frequently leads to conflicts between parents and the children. Here, we see an opportunity for game design to address player disengagement through design, facilitating a timely and autonomous exit from play. Hence, while most research and practitioners design for maximizing player engagement, we argue for a perspective shift towards disengagement as a design tool that allows for unobtrusive and smooth exits from the game. We advocate that interweaving disengagement into the game design could reduce friction within families, allowing children to finish game sessions more easily, facilitate a sense of autonomy, and support an overall healthier relationship with games. In this position paper, we outline a research agenda that examines how game design can address player disengagement, what challenges exist in the specific context of games for children, and how such approaches can be reconciled with the experiential, artistic, and commercial goals of games.