No abstract

In recent years, there has been significant work in integrating physical activity into video games. One goal of this work has been to help motivate sedentary people to be more physically active. Konami's Dance Dance Revolution and Nintendo's Wii Sports have shown that exercise games can be both fun and commercially successful.To date, however, there has been little attempt to investigate what properties of exercise games will help motivate sedentary people to start and continue exercise programs. This paper reviews the literature on exercise motivation and derives from it requirements for computer-aided exercise games. The paper then introduces the new Life is a Village exercise game, and uses it to illustrate how these requirements can be met.

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) want to play fast-paced action-oriented videogames similar to those played by their peers without motor disabilities. This is particularly true of exergames, whose physically-active gameplay matches the fast pace of action games. But disabilities resulting from CP can make it difficult to play action games. Guidelines for developing games for people with motor disabilities steer away from high-paced action, including recommendations to avoid the need for time-sensitive actions and to keep game pace slow. Through a year-long participatory design process with children with CP, we have discovered that it is in fact possible to develop action-oriented exergames for children with CP at level III on the Gross Motor Function Classification Scale. We followed up the design process with an eight-week home trial, in which we found the games to be playable and enjoyable. In this paper, we discuss the design of these games, and present a set of design recommendations for how to achieve both actionorientation and playability.

The Model View Controller (MVC) architecture has proven to be an effective way of organizing synchronous groupware applications.Distributed implementations of MVC, however, can suffer from poor performance. This paper demonstrates how optimized semi-replication of MVC architectures can lead to good performance (over both local and wide area networks. We present a series {of optimizations to network communication based on specific communication properties of groupware.These optimizations have been implemented in the Clock groupware development toolkit, allowing programmers to develop applications directly in the high-level MVC style, with Clock automatically providing optimized performance.Timings of an application developed in Clock show that usable speed was obtained in a highly interactive groupware application running between Toronto and Calgary, with a typical latency of 190 ms per round trip message, The paper discusses the tradeoffs involved in the algorithms, and presents timings to demonstrate the effectiveness of the different approaches.The timings show that when running over a wide area network, the best optimization can achieve a factclr 60 speedup over the naive implementation of distributed MVC.

This paper presents a study of collaboration in software design at a large software company. Ethnographic studies of development teams in the field are relatively rare, so this paper contributes to a small, but growing, body of knowledge about the collaborative activities involved in such design work. Five separate development groups were studied over a six-week period. The methodology included shadowing, interviews and communication event logging. A novel PDA-based application was used for real-time data collection. The results of the study indicate that designers communicate frequently, using a wide variety of communication and collaboration modalities. Designers prefer generalpurpose tools to domain-specific applications. In support of communication, designers frequently change their physical location throughout the day. Finally, designers frequently change the ways in which they communicate, changing their communication modalities and styles.