Touchomatic: interpersonal touch gaming in the wild

Marshall, Joe; Tennent, Paul

Abstract

Direct touch between people is a key element of social behaviour. Recently a number of researchers have explored games which sense aspects of such interpersonal touch to control interaction with a multiplayer computer game. In this paper, we describe a long term, in-the-wild study of a two-player arcade game which is controlled by gentle touching between the body parts of two players. We ran the game in a public videogame arcade for a year, and present a thematic analysis of 27 hours of gameplay session videos, organized under three top level themes: control of the system, interpersonal interaction within the game, and social interaction around the game. In addition, we provide a quantitative analysis of observed demographic differences in interpersonal touch behaviour. Finally, we use these results to present four design recommendations for use of interpersonal touch in games.

Citation

Marshall, J., & Tennent, P. (2017). Touchomatic: interpersonal touch gaming in the wild. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems - DIS '17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064727

• Conference Name: 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17)
• End Date: Jun 14, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Mar 25, 2017
• Publication Date: Jun 10, 2017
• Deposit Date: Aug 9, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 9, 2017
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems - DIS '17
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064727
• Keywords: Interpersonal touch; game; in the wild; arcade
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/865250
• Publisher URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3064663.3064727
• Additional Information: Published in: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. New York : ACM, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4503-4922-2. doi:10.1145/3064663.3064727