Single Display Gaming: Examining Collaborative Games for Multi-User Tabletops

Playing games has always been a joint activity. New hardware developments such as multi-user touch-sensitive tabletop surfaces offer new possibilities to support games with information technology. This paper analyzes the properties of games that are relevant for choosing an appropriate hardware setup, e.g. the need for public or personal data for different players. These properties lead us to a categorization of games. Based on these results, possible hardware configurations for different game categories are discussed. Four sample games are presented by which the influence of the hardware setup on the game has been studied. The paper concludes with the lessons learned from our classification of games and their weaknesses and the next steps we are going to