Joe Marshall, Florian “Floyd” Mueller, Steve Benford, Sebastiaan Pijnappel. 2016. Expanding Exertion Gaming, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 2016, Elsevier DOI:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.02.003

The full version lives on the DOI link above, if you don’t have access to sciencedirect, check out the author’s accepted version (PDF)

I wrote this in collaboration with the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT Melbourne. It is the result of a process of a lot of thinking about the state of exertion gaming as a research discipline. We present several critiques of what we see as the way that a lot of exertion gaming research focuses excessively on the health benefits of doing exercise and ignores the need to consider what might make a good game. Then we suggest some strategies for designing exertion games which aim to push the field of exertion gaming to explore a wider range of more interesting game designs. It’s based around 4 systems that we built with a focus on just building interesting things rather than any particular motivation to make big impacts on people’s lives.

Due to the journal publishing timescale, we wrote this some time back, the ideas in it have already influenced my work - most obviously in my CHI 2016 Paper “Designing Brutal Multiplayer Games”.

Related themes: Games, I seek the nerves under your skin, Interaction in Motion, Publications,