Towards Socially Immersive Fitness Games
Anna Lisa Martin‐Niedecken, Elena Márquez Segura, Katja Rogers, Stephan Niedecken, Laia Turmo Vidal · 2019
Despite many benefits of playing and exercising together in terms of motivation, engagement, and social relationships, many exergames are designed to be single player, while others implement only a facade of social play (e.g., leaderboards). The challenge remains: how can exergames be designed to balance fun, exertion, and social connection? In this work, we ran an embodied sketching activity with multiplayer variations of the Sphery Racer mixed-reality fitness game, allowing us to test physical and social game mechanics. We discuss here: i) preliminary results on how these variations support a rich training and social experience; and ii) the potential of our method to surface interesting design directions. These contributions can inspire others designing in this domain, and support the development of a rich design space for co-located exergames.