Physical Activity Motivating Games:You Can PLAY,MATE!

1. Physical Activity Motivating Games:You Can PLAY,MATE! ShlomoBerkovsky,JillFreyne,MacCoombe,DipakBhandari,NilufarBaghaei CSIRO Tasmanian ICT Centre GPO Box 1538,Hobart,Australia firstname.lastname@csiro.au OZCHI '09: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7

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

3. 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!(PhysicaLActivitYMotivaTinggamEs).

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

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

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

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