Distributed Embodied Team Play, a Distributed Interactive Pong Playground

This paper presents work in the field of distributed exertion games, which are controlled by moving the body. People play these games together while being located at different places in the world. The novel contribution of this paper is the introduction of distributed team play in which both collocated and distributed players participate. In our Distributed Interactive Pong Playground (DIPP) players bounce a ball towards a goal by moving, walking, and running around in a 5.3 by 5.3m interactive playground. We investigate whether we can increase coordination in movement between players by changing the game to enforce teamwork. This was done by letting the players in a team control one end each of a shared paddle, as opposed to both players having separate paddles. Although the results should be taken with care, the comparisons do indicate that we could steer the amount of coordination between players in this way. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of distributed team play on the level of coordination. The results indicate that coordination goes down if the teammate is at another location. In this distributed team setting, enforced team work through a connected paddle still leads to a higher level of measured coordination. In contrast, our current analysis of self-reported social presence did not show a clear difference, not favoring enforced team work nor a particular team distribution. With the DIPP and this study we provide a new direction for distributed exertion games with a focus on aspects of team play.