difficulty adjustment system similar to the one I designed for Virtual Ground.

This time, I found inspiration in the game and thesis paper of a USC student, Jenova Chen, who had written a paper titled “Flow in Games,” in which he analyzes a game he designed [ 5]. In his game, Flow, the player controls a creature through a 2-D top-down view as it evolves in a submarine environment, eating smaller organisms and avoiding bigger ones. As it successfully eats other organisms, the creature sinks in deeper waters, signaled by a darkening of the blue background representing the water environment. Chen was very interested in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, and decided to use a DDA system to control his game. He implemented a very simple strategy where the player, rather than being penalized if his creature got eaten by a bigger organism, would simply float back up to higher waters, regressing in a level with an opportunity to try again.

I decided to employ a similar strategy with Flying Machine, where instead of using a “health bar” feature common in video games to penalize players when they hit an obstacle, I would simply have the machine spiral down and lose altitude, giving the team time to switch controls and resume their ascension again.

In further iterations of the game, I would like to implement the following features: design of custom versions of machines based on a library of parts as well as the physical elements available in a given playground; power up collection as the machine is gaining altitude, to overcome more challenging obstacles; and

enable multiple machines with their respective team to interact within a shared environment seen across multiple PDAs.

their mind from memorizing button combinations and let them reflect on the close relationship between their bodily actions and the designed system.

Finally, to return to the main question this article tries to address, can these physical installations provide more than casual game experiences? It remains to be seen since both projects are still a work in progress, but certainly one can draw inspiration from nondigital physical games, where the use of the body constrained to a fixed set of rules has often been successful at providing these games with deeper gameplay.

It appears that body mapping might be the strategic design approach to take in order to create a meaningful experience through these installations. Despite the fact that work in this direction has significant history, there isn’t yet a set of established standards for designers and artists to follow, making the design of these projects all the more exciting to pursue.

Conclusion

What makes working on these installations so fascinating and yet so challenging is the unique convergence of three different creative disciplines with very different sets of constraints: interaction design, interactive art, and game design. To be successful, these installations require a careful balancing between opposites in each one of these disciplines.

From an interaction design standpoint, these physical installations are attempting to move away from traditional input devices such as the mouse or gamepad and use alternative gestural interfaces. How does one balance the need for a required level of user-friend-liness to make the installation accessible while at the same time introduce novel or at least unusual methods of interactions? Part of the answer can be found in replacing learned conventions, such as button clicks, with more natural body gestures closely mapped with the actions depicted within the environment represented in the game.

As interactive art, these installations are faced with the tension between providing a deconstruc-tive discourse about the computational medium itself while at the same time engaging the audience by offering an immersive experience. Should the interface be a mirror or a window? Here again, the solution probably comes from giving participants an interface in which using their bodies in a natural way can free

[ 5] Chen, J. “Flow in Games.” 2006. Available at http://www. jenovachen.com/flow-ingames.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Hieronymi’s recent
work focuses on the
boundaries between
games and art in physical
environments. He has talk-
ed and exhibited internationally in art ven-
ues and media festivals, such as Ars
Electronica, SIGGRAPH, FILE, IxDA
Interaction, Microwavefest, and Futureplay
among others. Hieronymi has received an
M.F.A. from the Design | Media Arts
department at the University of California,
Los Angeles (‘05), and a diploma of fine
Arts from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts,
Geneva, Switzerland (‘98). He is a profes-
sor of interactive design and game devel-
opment at the Savannah College of Art and
Design in Savannah, Georgia.

May + June 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516025
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00