Distributed Embodied Team Play, a Distributed Interactive Pong Playground

Abstract

This paper presents work in the field of distributed exertion games, which are controlled by moving the body. People play these games together while being located at different places in the world. The novel contribution of this paper is the introduction of distributed team play in which both collocated and distributed players participate. In our Distributed Interactive Pong Playground (DIPP) players bounce a ball towards a goal by moving, walking, and running around in a 5.3 by 5.3 m interactive playground. We investigate whether we can increase coordination in movement between players by changing the game to enforce teamwork. This was done by letting the players in a team control one end each of a shared paddle, as opposed to both players having separate paddles. Although the results should be taken with care, the comparisons do indicate that we could steer the amount of coordination between players in this way. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of distributed team play on the level of coordination. The results indicate that coordination goes down if the teammate is at another location. In this distributed team setting, enforced team work through a connected paddle still leads to a higher level of measured coordination. In contrast, our current analysis of self-reported social presence did not show a clear difference, not favoring enforced team work nor a particular team distribution. With the DIPP and this study we provide a new direction for distributed exertion games with a focus on aspects of team play.

Co-located augmented play-spaces: past, present, and perspectives

“…Several interactive floor systems exist for indoor purposes, with mainly LEDs or projections as means of feedback, and using either RFID [135], pressure sensors [42,136,137], a laserscanner [58], Doppler radars [136], and/or computer vision to track people [60,138,139]. Several target groups have participated in studies with these floors, including children [140], families [135], students [26,139,141], intellectually disabled people [137], rehabilitants [42], and hearing impaired people [138].…”

(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior

“…It can also be used to change how players interact with each other. In Chapter 4 we already showed that playgrounds can increase coordination by adding (changed) game objects [256], and in Chapter 5 we showed it can balance the game for players' skill differences, or influence with whom players interact [260]. These kinds of steering behavior can be clearly relevant for the goals that are often used as argumentation for interactive play, especially when integrated as adaptable or adaptive elements of the game.…”

“…Several target groups have participated in studies with these floors, including children [281], families [117], students [156,256,260], intellectually disabled people [283], rehabilitants [257], and hearing impaired people [102].…”

“…Questionnaires are also applied to look separately, and in more detail, into dimensions that are also part of the GEQ, such as (social) presence of other players [19,159,256], for example, with the Networked Minds Measure [85] or more regarding closeness [255,256], for example, with the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale (IOS) [13], aspects of Flow [159], and (sensory and imaginative) immersion [200], for example, with the Immersion Questionnaire by Jenett et al [106]. 1 There are also other 'GEQs' such as the Game Engagement Questionnaire-revised focusing on wholebody movement by Berthouze et al [27,28] based on the model behind an unpublished (and seemingly no longer retrievable) ' [53]' Game Engagement Questionnaire of Chen et al [54].…”

“…They also mention doing similar investigations into adding colocated teammates for their table-tennis-for-three game [175]. One interactive pong-playground (a camera-projection playground) was even specifically created for distributed play with colocated team play in different configurations [256]. It could be interesting to see more exertion based systems or to further investigate what the effects would be of different configurations on social presence and movement coordination between team members, and this will be one aspect of Chapter 4 using the latter playground: what configuration would be more beneficial, having colocated team members with a team of distributed opponents, or colocated opponents with distributed team members?…”