Designing for social and physical interaction in exertion games

Exertion games lend themselves to facilitating social and physical interactions, in particular when compared to button-press games. However, there is little understanding of how specific aspects of an exertion game's design can facilitate these social and physical interactions. In response, we present a set of design themes based on our analysis of players' experiences with a distributed table tennis game. The themes are: Shared Object, Anticipation, Secondary Performance, Movement Variety, and Uncertainty. We hope that these themes can guide other designers who aim to support social and physical interaction in order to support players profiting from the many associated benefits.