Hello everyone i'm Oz from Gamification Group, Tampere University, Finland and today i will
tell you about our journey of designing gaming wearables starting from a participatory design
workshop until the concept creation but before delving into what we have done
let's talk about gaming wearables that have been impactful in the mainstream gaming market recently
gaming wearables are an emergent field and several examples were released recently such as fallout
4's pip-boy which was part of its collector edition pokemon go plus which is a device
that can be attached clothes or worn as a bracelet and gives notifications about the pokemons around
in the pokemon game or nintendo switch's labo robot kit which is a cardboard backpack
that facilitates bodily play and connection to the digital avatar however the gaming wearables for
mainstream game platforms are almost limited to those examples when we consider devices
that are closely connected to games and these wearables have limitations such as they are
targeted only a specific game and lack versatility in terms of game mechanics
and interactions as we have explicated gaming wearables field is an emergent one however all
these examples attracted the attention of players for example the fallout 4's pip boy has been the
fastest selling collector edition ever apart from that it is expected that they become more
widespread in the future and especially with the increasing popularity of virtual reality gaming
we expect more wearable interfaces for games to emerge however currently existing examples do
not provide a rich design knowledge and inform the field regarding the expectations of stakeholders
from gaming wearables for mainstream game platforms such as PCs consoles or mobile devices
this is why we wanted to deeply explore this field by incorporating different kinds of stakeholders
by conducting a series of participatory design workshops with 33 participants these participants
had different backgrounds such as electronic engineering software development game design
interaction design bioadaptive design and also cosplay to examine the costuming features of
wearables of course we also included players with different gaming habits we have organized
six workshops that focused on various strengths of wearables. First five workshops respectively
focus on interactive aspects social features costuming angle movement and bioadaptivity
in games each workshop resulted in three different key themes totalling to 15 design themes in the
sessions. After, we gathered these participants in the fusion workshop and we mixed and matched them
in groups so they can share their experiences. By drawing upon each other's knowledge gained
in the first five workshops, in the fusion workshop, they created holistic gaming wearables.
By drawing on all these knowledge, we created seven design implications and five different
novel gaming wearable concepts guided by these design implications. Let's briefly go through the
design knowledge created in this process our first set of output was the key design themes which were
created in the first five atom workshops we don't have time to go through all of them but
let's give an example to see the nature of it for example the "mechanics" theme from the costuming
workshop indicates that costuming qualities of playful wearables should also correspond
to meaningful game mechanics an example given by participants was a player who was
wearing a bandage if the player would have to hold the bandage when the in-game character is injured
player would need to play the game with only one hand for a while adding an additional challenge
because the character was injured but also connects the player to the imaginary avatar in a
more emotional way because the players hold their body similar to what an injured character would do
this theme, then, is centered around how costume pieces can lead to game mechanics that can also
create bodily connections to game character. By drawing upon those themes participants created
intermediary design concepts in the fusion workshop one of the interesting concepts
was a W'g called Head-on. Head-on is a costume piece which creates a connection
between the player and the character while also transferring the emotions of the player to the
game by using an embedded EEG device for example when the player is calm they can create a bigger
fireball while fireball can be more ineffective if they can not contain a lower heart rate.
Head-on also brings in various different spots on the wearable that can be used in the game
as in here when player holds and plays with the ear the in-game character does the same or when
a button on the braid is pressed character raises a shield these features also fosters the material
and affective connection between the player and the character in addition to the transfer
of emotions we introduce two more concepts coined by participants in the paper please
go ahead and check them if you're interested up until this point the presented knowledge were
put forth by our participants in the workshops from now on we will present our interpretation
of this knowledge in the form of design implications and final gaming wearable concepts
by connecting the different nodes of design knowledge created we have extracted seven
design implications these implications actually were presented as game cards in our pictorial
as you can see each card has icons belonging to the key themes and the intermediary concepts
while creating design implications it is possible to fall into the pitfall of filtering
many important details emerged in the design process by visually mapping the design knowledge
created in the process to our cards we could easily track back to the themes and the
concepts that guided specific implications this visualization may help understand the rationale
behind the implications and allow to grasp the important details of the design knowledge
these seven implications guided our further design process however i'm sure that they are more
interesting to read rather than to listen to more important thing here is how we incorporated them
in the design process for further details check our pictorial and if you also need to see a deeper
engagement with them please stay tuned for our CHI 2021 paper called "Towards the Next Generation of
Gaming Wearables" put in a circular form here we turned our cards into implication wheels
we used these wheels to informally assess the relation of the final concepts we created with
the design implications they also worked towards understanding the unexplored parts to create
design concepts that can satisfy these unexplored points we have created many different concepts but
chose five of them to present in more detail in the pictorial among these five concepts let's make
a raffle and choose one to depict here in this presentation you can see the rest in the pictorial
[Cartoon Slot Machine Sound Effect]
[Winning Sound Effect]
And the lucky one is the Gaming Cloth. In our pictorial we have presented each
concept with a fictional use case scenario told by the perspective of users. Here
i will also try to do some acting by reanimating this fictional scenario. Here it comes.
When I see gaming clothes i was quite excited by this fabric-based wearable but
to be honest also a bit skeptical about its usefulness in the game
i first tried Gaming Cloth for the computer roleplaying game that the game was specifically
designed for the Gaming Cloth and you could use it in many ways for example if you cover
your body against an attack [hadouken sound effect] like this you can use it as a shield or
let's say your character is injured then you can basically [heartbeat sound effect] wrap it
around your arm and it becomes a bandage and heals [healing sound effect] your character
it was quite good and interesting to see that i can use whole my body as a gaming surface but
i was able to even use it as an extension of my body like for example
i can wrap it around my hand and it can become a tentacle and i can
just you know hit hit [whiplash sound effect] the enemies with that or it has also sensors
here that can detect some of my bodily data and if i wear it for example like this as a wizard cloak
and if i can keep my calm for a while i can become invisible
Gaming Cloth is an interesting product that completely or let's say that can completely
change how i can play games by putting my body into them but there is only a few games so far
that is supported by the Gaming Cloth and if there was not any more released soon
i i don't know maybe it can become useless i hope they will release more games for that product
i thank you all for attending this talk and we believe that the knowledge
created throughout our process will be guiding for the design of gaming wearables
and the final concepts we presented demonstrate a glimpse of what playful wearables can bring
to the game experience apart from that we also found quite useful to visualize
all the design knowledge and map it throughout the process to understand how it is incorporated
in different phases of our design i hope that you will also enjoy reading the pictorial
and it will be useful for your research thanks again and feel free to ask any questions