Helping Hands: Designing Video Games with Interpersonal Touch Interaction

Increasingly, the movements of players’ physical bodies are being used as a method of controlling and playing video games. This trend is evidenced by the recent development of interpersonal touch-based games; multiplayer games which players control by physically touching their partners. Although a small number of interpersonal touch-based games have recently been designed, the best practices for creating video games based on this unconventional interaction technique remain poorly explored and understood. In this paper, we provide an overview of interpersonal touch interaction in video games and present a set of design heuristics for the effective use of interpersonal touch interaction in video games. We then use these heuristics to analyze three current interpersonal touch-based games in order to show how these heuristics reflect on the current state of the art. Finally, we present our vision for the future of this interaction modality in video games.