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Embodied Interaction in Play: Body-Based and Natural Interaction in Games

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Entertainment Computing and Serious Games

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9970))

Abstract

This chapter describes embodied interaction as a stance towards interaction design for games. It aims at informing game developers with bridging concepts between gameplay and different interaction paradigms that incorporate and focus on the human body (i.e., body-based, natural and tangible interaction). It highlights challenges, potentials and pitfalls of physical interactions and discusses the role of the human mind-body relation as a fundamental concept towards serious game interaction design. This chapter underlines embodied interaction in play as a promising perspective for game developers, that puts emphasize on the notion of humans as social and physical creatures with sentient bodies and highlights the relevance of this perspective for serious game interaction design as well as research in the field. One of the main challenges for researchers in this field will be to create meaningful interactions that internalize these concepts as integral parts of how serious games achieve their impact.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

    Bernhard Maurer

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  1. Bernhard Maurer
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Correspondence to Bernhard Maurer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. RheinMain University of Applied Sciences , Wiesbaden, Germany

    Ralf Dörner

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt , Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Göbel

  3. TU Graz , Graz, Austria

    Michael Kickmeier-Rust

  4. University of Duisburg-Essen , Duisburg, Germany

    Maic Masuch

  5. TU Kaiserslautern , Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Katharina Zweig

Further Readings and Theoretical Grounding

Further Readings and Theoretical Grounding

To get a more thorough understanding of the theoretical concepts and perspectives mentioned in this chapter, the following list is suggested as a starting point for further readings:

  • Embodied Interaction: Dourish, P.: Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT press (2004) [19];

  • Somaesthetics: Shusterman, R.: Body consciousness: A philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press (2008) [54];

  • Human body-mind relation: Bergen, B.K.: Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Basic Books (2012) [14]; Pfeifer, R., Bongard, J.: How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence. MIT press (2006) [50];

  • Tangible Interaction: Hornecker et al.: Getting a grip on tangible interaction: a framework on physical space and social interaction [26]; Ishii et al.: Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms [27].

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Maurer, B. (2016). Embodied Interaction in Play: Body-Based and Natural Interaction in Games. In: Dörner, R., Göbel, S., Kickmeier-Rust, M., Masuch, M., Zweig, K. (eds) Entertainment Computing and Serious Games. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9970. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46152-6_15

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