Towards a 2nd person perspective on bodily play

Recent HCI work on digital games highlighted the advantage for designers to take on a 1 st person perspective on the human body (referring to the phenomenological “lived” body) and a 3 rd 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 2 nd person social perspective that highlights the unique interplay between human bodies. To guide designers interested in supporting players to experience their social bodies as play, we describe how game designers can engage with the 2 nd person perspective through two design tactics based on two of our own play systems. With our work, we hope we can aid designers in embracing this 2 nd person perspective so that more people can benefit from engaging their bodies through games and play.