Reel It In: a Gamified Focus Time Application; Exploring the Positive and Negative Effects of Video Games on Cognitive and Social Development 5 views

This undergraduate thesis portfolio contains two projects, one technical project and one research paper, both relating to video games. The main relating point of the two projects is how video games impact people. The technical capstone project focuses on phone addiction and attention issues. My group all agreed that phone use, or overuse, was a rising issue that has become more and more prevalent in the last decade. We aimed to create a fun phone game that would encourage the user to have more healthy technology habits. My research paper focuses more on how video games affect children’s development. The motivation for this project was due to my experience playing video games. I spent much of my free time growing up playing video games. The experiences I had while playing these games strongly shaped who I became as I grew up. The stereotype of video games causing people to become isolated and non-contributing members of society is something I disagreed with heavily. My experiences made me believe that video games can lead to the outcomes just mentioned, it can also have very positive effects that were largely unexplored. As such, my research paper seeks to find the what the impacts of playing video games are on children and teenagers. Mobile device distraction has become a pervasive problem that negatively affects productivity, learning, and overall well-being. Existing digital wellness tools limit distractions through timers or application blocking, however there is little allure to these applications beyond a desire to limit phone use. The technical report presents Reel It In, an iOS application that utilizes focus sessions with a gamified reward system designed to promote habitual use. The game itself is a simply fishing game, where the user is able to move their boat back and forth and catch fish that it they can sell for coins. Users can then use those coins to buy collectible trophies and other items. Fishing costs stamina, which can only be gained via entering focus mode. Focus mode allows you to select distracting applications and block them from being opened via parental controls for a set period of time. Upon the completion of focus mode, the applications are unlocked and users may go fishing again. We evaluated the application through beta testing, assessing both focus effectiveness and gameplay satisfaction. Results indicate that users experienced reduced distraction during focus sessions and found the gameplay enjoyable. These findings suggest that gamification can serve as an effective mechanism for improving adherence to digital wellness tools. The research paper in this portfolio focuses on the impact that video games have on the development of someone’s cognitive and social skills. It touches on both positives and negatives for both. I wrote a brief auto-ethnography that is used to portray my experiences playing video games. This paper also uses many studies, experiments and opinions of researchers to attempt to provide context to how playing video games affects children. The paper used the framework of technological determinism to analyze the various findings. This allowed me to treat video games as the cause of the changes in children and teenagers, positive or negative. The paper found that there were many positive benefits, such as better attention, more creativity and better communication skills. It also found the potential for issues such as gaming addiction and potential anti-social behaviors to happen due to playing video games. The paper pulls from many sources and deeply considers the positives and negatives, showing that while there are some concerns with children playing games, there is also the potential for video games to help the development of children and teenagers. While it was not the focus of my research paper, working on these projects together taught me a good deal about intentional game design. A line of research that I did not use in my paper was focused on games designed specifically for some purpose. The reason I chose not to pursue it was because I was more focused on games that are typically played during children’s free time. The topic of educational video games, or gamified educational systems are pieces of technology that require very careful design decisions in order to actually enable learning while remaining fun for users. While the capstone project I worked on was not educational, I found that designing a game with an additional important purpose was quite challenging. It made me appreciate the difficult design decisions and considerations that educational game designers must go through, as well as take my time with decisions regarding my capstone. It would’ve been very easy to rush into the capstone project and focus on the game portion, without considering how to tie in the focus part of the application. Working on these two projects together helped me to take a step back and think about my capstone project as a whole when weighing options for decisions such as balancing and mechanics. It made me gain a deep appreciation for completing tasks while focusing on a greater overarching goal that I otherwise would not have gained.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Focus; Video Game; Game; Children; Teens; Development; Cognitive; Social

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Mark Sherriff STS Advisor: Bryn Seabrook Technical Team Members: Keshav Tarafdar, Edward Boehling, Alwyn Dippenaar

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-05