A 2nd person social perspective on bodily play

Recent HCI work on digital games highlighted the advantage for designers to take on a 1st person perspective on the human body (referring to the phenomenological “lived” body) and a 3rd person perspective (the material “fleshy” body, similar to looking in the mirror). This is useful when designing bodily play, however, we note that there is not much game design discussion on the 2nd person social perspective that highlights the unique interplay between human bodies. To guide designers interested in supporting players to experience their bodies as play, we describe how game designers can engage with the 2nd person social perspective through a set of design tactics based on four of our own play systems. With our work, we hope we can aid designers in embracing this 2nd person perspective so that more people can benefit from engaging their bodies through games and play.