Interactions - November/December 2017

design ethicist. Thrive Global. 2016; https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-

56d62ef5edf3

5. Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., and Zubek, R.

MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. Proc. of the Challenges in Games AI Workshop, Nineteenth National Conference of Artificial Intelligence. 2004; http://zubek.net/robert/publications/ MDA.pdf

6. Isbister, K., Abe, K., and Karlesky, M. Interdependent wearables (for play): A strong concept for design. Proc. of CHI

2017, 465–471.

Katherine Isbister is professor of computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and director of the Center for Games and Playable Media. Her research is at the intersection of games and HCI. She is the author of How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design from MI T Press.

→ katherine.isbister@ucsc.edu

clever avatar affordances, to get people to deeply enjoy working together and feeling co-present. For example, the console game Little Big Planet gives players the ability to puppet exaggerated vaudeville-esque facial expressions and gestures in their avatars, leading people to use the avatars to communicate, even when in the same room. Here’s a player’s description:

Helen calls them the “Hurrah!” buttons.

L2 + R2 + both analog sticks held upwards.

Whenever she wins the most points on a

Little Big Planet level, she presses these buttons, and her grinning Sackgirl lifts both arms in the air in wordless celebration.

My Sackboy, meanwhile, tends to scowl and storm off the side of the screen, fists clenched. Or, after a particularly stressful level, he might pull out a frying pan and hit Helen’s Sackgirl over the head. Helen tends to take losing slightly better. She will drag my Sackboy away from the camera, mid-disco dance, in a vain attempt to take the spotlight. Either way, nigh every level ends in a comical scuffle between our characters without a word spoken between us in the real world ( https://killscreen.com/ articles/sackboy-says-no-words/).

These avatars heighten the social experience for the players, adding to the pleasure of playing together.

But let’s move beyond the screen and into the realm of wearables and ubiquitous computing. Experimental game designers are currently taking up the aesthetic aims of connection and mutual presence, and producing imaginative prototypes for how we might support these goals with technology.

For example, I collaborated with indie game designer Kaho Abe, who created a wearables-based game called

Hotaru. Abe built two unique and interdependent wearables for the game that required close physical coordination and collaboration from players [ 6].

Playing Hotaru brings players closer together both literally and figuratively.

This is a very different experience to many current-generation functional wearables, which support personal data monitoring and keeping track of social networks, rather than heightening in-person interaction.

If we value social connection as a
social good, we need to ensure it isn’t lost
as we move toward a highly technology-
infused, networked world. We don’t have
to sacrifice quality of shared presence,
but we do have to value it and work hard
to achieve it. We can learn a great deal
from game designers.

Endnotes

1. Khullar, D. How social isolation is killing us. New York Times. Dec. 22, 2016; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/ 22/upshot/how-social-isolation-is-killing- us.html

2. Ilardi, S. Social isolation: A modern plague. Psychology Today. Jul. 13, 2009; https://www.psychologytoday.com/ blog/the-depression-cure/200907/social- isolation-modern-plague

3. Twenge, J.M. Have smartphones destroyed a generation? The Atlantic. (Sept. 2017); https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone- destroyed-a-generation/534198/