Understanding handicapping for balancing exertion games

Type of content
Conference Contributions - Published
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
University of Canterbury. Human Interface Technology Laboratory
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
Date
2013
Authors
Billinghurst, Mark
Altimira, D.
Mueller, F.
Abstract

Balancing play can be important for engaging people in games since it allows players with different skills and abilities to play together and still feel challenged. Balancing play in exertion games has mainly been explored by challenging the physical effort. To further our understanding of how to design for more balanced experiences, we extend this prior work by studying the affect on player’s score by a score handicap. This gives the less skilled player an initial score advantage. A performance handicap was also studied by asking the most skilled player to play with the non-dominant hand. We studied digital and non-digital table tennis games, which provide different game interactions, as examples of non-parallel, competitive games. Our results show that these different game interactions influenced the impact the different handicaps had on player’s scores. Therefore, we suggest the game interaction is a key element to understand the suitability of score and performance balancing methods.

Description
Citation
Billinghurst, M., Altimira, D., Mueller, F. (2013) Understanding handicapping for balancing exertion games. Paris, France: CHI '13, 27 Apr-2 May 2013. CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1125-1130.
Keywords
Exertion interface, sports, social interaction, play balancing, handicapping, engagement
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Field of Research::08 - Information and Computing Sciences::0806 - Information Systems::080602 - Computer-Human Interaction
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