Augmenting Co-Located Social Play with Biofeedback: An Interactional Approach

Biofeedback holds great potential for augmenting game play, but research to date has focussed predominantly on single player games. This paper proposes an interactional approach, which emphasises how multiple players engage with biofeedback and one another to make sense of the feedback and to incorporate it into their game play. To explore this approach in the context of the dice game Mia, we designed AMR (Augmented Mia), a prototype system that gives feedback on heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature on a player's hat or armband. A study with 21 participants showed that biofeedback was ambiguous, but nevertheless participants harnessed it as a hint about their opponents' strategies, as a means of distraction, as a handicap when players could not see their own feedback as it was presented on their hat, and as a point of connection with other players. We discuss the mechanisms underlying these interactions and present design opportunities along spatial, temporal, and compositional dimensions of biofeedback that encourage and heighten social interaction.