at home for many years now, and at present all three major home game consoles come equipped with movement sensors. The tremendous success of Nintendo’s Wii platform convinced game companies that movement was something players valued and wanted more of, and that it was a way to gain an even broader audience for gaming. The industry has radically embraced movement-based interaction and is racing to evolve best practices for using movement.

Of course, best practices are defined somewhat differently for games than for productivity applications. The core definition of success for a game is that a person enjoys the game enough to keep playing it, rather than that it helps the person to achieve a task. This puts a great deal of emphasis on how the experience feels moment-to-moment.

As one game designer puts it:

Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either [ 4].

Game designers use nested sets of goals and discoveries that keep players cognitively challenged as one powerful way to maintain engagement. But another important way is the crafting of compelling “game feel” [ 5]. Game feel is the moment-by-moment sensation of the system’s response to the player—the kinesthetic qualities of the experience created by coupling with the input device and seeing what happens in the game as a result. Designers and players talk about how certain games have really great game feel, something valuable in its own right.

A colleague and I wrote a paper for CHI 2009 that introduced these notions, which we framed as “suppleness,” to the HCI community [ 6]. In this paper, we argued that designers must turn their attention to the qualities of coupling with the system—of the moment-to-moment interaction—to create more supple experiences and, along the way, invent a more supple design and evaluation process that can reliably produce these kinds of end-use experiences.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that this is an excellent organizing principle for approaching movement-based interaction design. What if we place considerable design emphasis on how a movement makes a person feel in her body—as she performs it, and at the end of an extended interaction with the system? This led to my lab group’s efforts to pin down essential qualities of the feel of movement-based interaction, toward generating useful and well-grounded design practices and principles.

 

Chasing the Connection Between Emotion and Movement in the Lab We have been using two complementary approaches to glean a better understanding of how to design movements to evoke desired feelings for players/users. The first approach is to closely read the work of commercial game designers. We examined movement mechanics from a broad range of Wii games, categorizing motion qualities toward generating useful design patterns [ 7]. When working within the same target design space,

 

• Figure 1 (top). Video record of movement- based games study. Figure 2. Wriggle, a simple movement-based game. Figures 3a and 3b. Scoop, a movement-based game for learning math.

a

September + October 2011

b