scenarios and tensions between collaboration and competition in the game, but at the risk of creating an overly confusing gaming environment for the players.

In Virtual Ground and Flying Machine—two physical gaming installations—I attempted to address these issues.

[1] Huhtamo, E. “Seeking Deeper Contact. Interactive Art as Metacommentary.” Convergence 1, no. 2 (1995): 81-104.

[ 2] Salen. K. and E. Zimmerman. “Game design and meaningful play”, from Handbook of Computer Games Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005.

first acting and then seeing the result of the screen—leads to a more direct, seamless type of interaction.

Finally, there’s a performative quality in playing through the various modules and executing the different full-body gestures in front of an audience. While most adults would be uneasy and self-conscious, the games confer a sense of competition, pride, and drive to excel to younger players.

Even though MOVE ended up providing a very enjoyable, entertaining experience to most people who interacted with it, my initial ambition when designing it was to raise a certain consciousness about the combination and complexity of the various actions that participants accomplish when controlling their avatars in video games. I wanted to deconstruct basic avatar behavior by separating actions in individual game modules, and offer participants a way to perform those actions through a series of mini-games. The installation was a means to deconstruct a medium (video games) using the medium itself, a process that media theorist Erkki Huhtamo has described as “metacommentary” [1].

After MOVE, I became interested in the challenge of designing multiplayer, physical gaming installations that would give users a gameplay experience more complex than what MOVE provided. Single-player mini-games could offer only limited interactive experiences, even though they worked quite well within a physical gaming context.

The games could be learned very easily thanks to simple rules. Because they required

intense physical movement, their duration was brief so as not to be too exhausting; because they were short, they allowed quick permutation of players, important in a gallery or media-event setting, which sometimes means large crowds.

Nonetheless, I was curious to see if it would be possible to give players a more complex gameplay experience through a physical gaming installation. Instead of providing a simple goal (avoid circle), I wanted to give players a combination of direct, short-term goals and indirect, long-term goals: what Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen call “micro and macro goals” [ 2]. Would it be possible for players to develop strategies by balancing priorities between micro and macro goals in a hectic, physical environment? Such a game would require a higher learning curve, thereby risking alienating casual or inexperienced gamers, and void the advantage that the physical setting and intuitive body input provides.

Longer gameplay would lead to deeper immersion for the players within the representational environment and could allow for a more complex depiction of system simulations, giving players more convincing and complex roles. Nonetheless, the attempt to depict a representational world could lead to a loss in the immediacy that the abstract shapes of MOVE afforded, which gave players a higher consciousness of their own actions as opposed to a feeling of immersion in a virtual world.

Creating a multiplayer game environment would allow emphasizing interaction between players, and creating interesting

Virtual Ground

After MOVE, I decided to develop a multiplayer physical game with a similar installation setup, a floor-based projection with graphics updated based on participants’ movement tracked by a camera located on the ceiling and pointing down vertically to the projection.

This new installation, Virtual Ground, is a loose reference to the technical definition in which a virtual ground is part of an electrical circuit that is maintained in a state of equilibrium, usually through a process of negative feedback.

The first reason for using this title was my interest in developing a game around the analogy of electrical flow, in which a virtual electrical current represented by a line drawn between players would charge a particle which, in turn, would be used to gradually light up a grid-based surface projected on the floor.

At the beginning of the game, participants see a floor projection with a grid of 4x3 squares. Inside the grid, a small circle (particle) is rebounding within the boundaries of the grid. As participants enter the projected area, circles appear on the floor, following them and adjusting their movement to be always in the center of the participant’s silhouette. A line appears between participants and adjusts