Let's Get Physical: How Physical Control Methods Make Games Fun

Abstract

Despite their widespread acceptance, traditional computer gaming interfaces such as the monitor and keyboard fundamentally serve to separate players from their games. In this paper, we examine how physically-based control methods which leverage the physical movement of their players as a method for playing games can be used to foster player immersion, creating games which are intuitive, accessible and fun. An examination of how a mixed reality interfaces support (and even encourage) physical controls follows, where we discuss two of our mixed reality game implementations Save Em and Napkin Chess.