This lends itself to the
conclusion that free play is not suitable for elderly without
prior gaming experience. For most of our players, recalling
gestures was too challenging on their own. While proper
game tutorials for institutionalized older adults remain to be
explored in future work, one possible solution might be to
introduce longer training periods for all gestures or
designing game mechanics that suggest gesture affordances.
For example, picking apples from a tree would trigger a
known gesture and might be an easier game mechanic.
Also, some of the participants seemed to be more alert and
awake during the second part of the study, while others
were less engaged. Therefore, an individual gesture
adaptation is not only necessary to accommodate different
players but also to account for the age-related within-player
variances that we have observed in these studies.