Urban Exergames: How Architects and Serious Gaming Researchers Collaborate on the Design of Digital Games that Make You
This chapter presents a novel research collaboration between architects and computer scientists to investigate and develop mobile, context-sensitive serious games for sports and health (so-called exergames). Specifically, it describes a new approach that
- PDF / 666,648 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 182 Views
Urban Exergames: How Architects and Serious Gaming Researchers Collaborate on the Design of Digital Games that Make You Move Martin Knöll, Tim Dutz, Sandro Hardy and Stefan Göbel Abstract This chapter presents a novel research collaboration between architects and computer scientists to investigate and develop mobile, context-sensitive serious games for sports and health (so-called exergames). Specifically, it describes a new approach that aims to design exergames which interact with the player’s built, topographic, and social environment in a meaningful way and presents strategies on how to integrate research on health-oriented urban design and planning to the design of such games. To that end, this chapter analyzes the state of the art of mobile context-sensitive exergames and introduces the reader to the basics of “Active Street Design”. After recapitulating how the built environment influences physical activity such as walking, cycling, and stair climbing in everyday situations, it is speculated on how to integrate best practices and guidelines from architecture into the game design process in order to create attractive and more effective exergames. The chapter is concluded with a discussion on strategies to validate the (positive) side-effects of urban exergames and an outline of future research directions.
11.1 Motivation The advance of child obesity, especially in western countries, is a well-documented phenomenon [8]. As obesity is known to promote a variety of medical disorders, such as diabetes and hypertension, this trend is likely to turn into a severe problem for societies as a whole within a few years. People affected suffer from a shortened M. Knöll (*) Urban Health Games Research Group, Department of Architecture, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Dutz · S. Hardy · S. Göbel Serious Gaming Research Group, Multimedia Communications Lab, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
M. Ma et al. (eds.), Virtual, Augmented Reality and Serious Games for Healthcare 1, Intelligent Systems Reference Library 68, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-54816-1_11, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
191
192
M. Knöll et al.
life expectancy and oftentimes report a generally reduced quality of life [24]. Consequently, the fight against childhood and adolescence obesity has become a major challenge for governments, medical institutes, and fitness professionals alike. It is often pointed to the various causes for obesity including an increase of calorie intake and decrease of physical activity on a population level, social environments, individual lifestyle choices and genetic disposition. James et al. [14] highlighted that genetic disposition would make a major difference in individual susceptibility to weight gain among people living in comparable environments. In their view, it is therefore obligatory to oppose the numerous prejudices and immense pressure that is put on obese children and adults’ excess weight. The most appropriate response would be to consider environmental circumstances
Data Loading...
