Physical Activity Motivating Games:You Can PLAY,MATE! Shlomo Berkovsky,Jill Freyne,Mac Coombe,Dipak Bhandari,Nilufar Baghaei CSIRO Tasmanian ICT Centre GPO Box 1538,Hobart,Australia OZCHI '09: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7 1

Outline INTRODUCTION RELATED WORK DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE EMPIRICAL EVALUATION CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK 2

INTRODUCTION(1/2) Contemporary lifestyle is becoming increasingly inactive: a little physical activity and much sedentary activity. Present a novel approach aimed at combating sedentary in context of computer games. The game is called PLAY MATE!(PhysicaL ActivitY MotivaTing gamEs). 3

INTRODUCTION(2/2) PLAY,MATE! Is design to a publicly available computer game, Neverball. Each user was equipped with a 3D accelerometer. The contributions of this work are two-fold: – Firstly,we propose a novel PLAY,MATE! Design for physical activity motivating games and practically exemplify its application. – Secondly,we empirically evaluate the acceptance of the design and its influence on users. 4

RELATED WORK(1/2) Lin et. al., 2006 – presented a social application recording users' physical activity and linking it to the growth of a virtual fish Toscos et. al., 2006 – presented a mobile application recording users' physical activity and sending messages encouraging exercising These applications had several weaknesses including the unreliability and inaccuracy of self-reporting and the possibility of cheating the application. From a behavioural perspective, these applications were aimed at changing the lifestyle by indirectly encouraging the users to perform physical activity. 5

RELATED WORK(2/2) Commercial products – Dance-Dance Revolution – Nintendo Wii – PCGamerBike These games should be treated as commercial products providing bodily interfaces or controllers allowing anintuitive interaction mode with computer games rather than motivators of physical activity. 6

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(1/3) The goal of the PLAY, MATE! game design is to change the sedentary nature of game playing to include certain aspects of physical activity. 7

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(2/3) The motivation to perform physical activity is achieved by modifying the following game components and aspects of user interaction with the game: -Game motivator -Activity interface -Game control 8

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(3/3) To experimentally evaluate the PLAY, MATE! design, we applied it to an open source GPL Neverball game. We used a 3D accelerometer to capture user's physical activity and transmitted the acceleration signal to Neverball 9

EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(1/4) We conducted an experimental evaluation involving 180children aged 9 to 12 -Sedentary -PLAY,MATE! 10

EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(2/4) compares the number of jumps recognised in these two groups compares the relative time distribution between the sedentary playing and performing physical activity 11

EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(3/4) depicts the average perception across the two groups. the playing perception as a function of the number of jumps recognised. 12

EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(4/4) The number of users that agreed with two factors of a particular relevance to the enjoyment. 13

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Two important conclusions: -Firstly -Secondly PLAY, MATE! design to various types of computer games. 14