skip to main content
10.1145/2702613.2732514acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Games Against Health: A Player-Centered Design Philosophy

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper announces the "Games Against Health" (GAH) research agenda, a criticism of, and response to, the cultural imperialism of the "Games for Health" paradigm. Committed to player-centric design ethics, GAH seeks to dismantle the "games for health" myth as neo-liberal elitist diktat. We acknowledge the values, tastes and pleasures of billions of game players worldwide. We argue that game designers should engage more efficiently in the disimprovement of player health and wellbeing in order to cater to those players' existing preferences. We hope the paper can serve as a convenient reference for those designing psychotic, sociopathic or antisocial games.

References

[1]
Alvarez, G. G., & Ayas, N. T. (2004). The impact of daily sleep duration on health: a review of the literature. Progress in cardiovascular nursing, 19(2), 56--59.
[2]
Arkes, H. R. and Blumer, C. The Psychology of sunk cost. In Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(2), 124--140.
[3]
Carter, M., Nansen, B., & Gibbs, M. R. Screen ecologies, multi-gaming and designing for different registers of engagement. In Proceedings of ACM CHI PLAY 2014, 37--46.
[4]
Consolvo, S., Everitt, K., Smith, I., & Landay, J. A. Design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity. In Proceedings of ACM CHI, 2006, 457--466. ACM.
[5]
Coyle, D., Matthews, M., Sharry, J., Nisbet, A., & Doherty, G. (2005). Personal Investigator: A therapeutic 3D game for adolecscent psychotherapy. Interactive technology & smart education, 2(2), 73--88.
[6]
Flores, E., Tobon, G., Cavallaro, E., Cavallaro, F. I., Perry, J. C., & Keller, T. Improving patient motivation in game development for motor deficit rehabilitation. In Proceedings of ACE, 2008, 381--384.
[7]
Garbett, A., Wardman, J.K., Kirman, B., Linehan, C., and Lawson, S. Anti-Social Media: Communicating Risk through Open Data, Crime Maps and Locative Media. In Proc. HCI Korea conference 2014.
[8]
Klasnja, P., Consolvo, S., & Pratt, W. How to evaluate technologies for health behavior change in HCI research. In Proceedings of CHI (2011) 3063--3072.
[9]
Leggett, W. (2014). The politics of behaviour change: nudge, neoliberalism and the state. Policy & Politics, 42(1), 3--19.
[10]
Lewis, C., Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Whitehead, J. Motivational game design patterns of'ville games. In Proceedings of FDG 2012 (pp. 172--179). ACM.
[11]
Mandryk, R. L., Gerling, K. M., & Stanley, K. G. (2014). Designing games to discourage sedentary behaviour. In Playful User Interfaces (pp. 253--274). Springer Singapore.
[12]
Nacke, L. E., Kalyn, M., Lough, C., & Mandryk, R. L. Biofeedback game design: using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2011, 103--112.
[13]
Pollak, J., Gay, G., Byrne, S., Wagner, E., Retelny, D., & Humphreys, L. (2010). It's time to eat! Using mobile games to promote healthy eating. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 9(3), 21--27.
[14]
Sunstein CR, Thaler R. 2003. Libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Univ. of Chicago L. Rev. 70: 1159--1202.
[15]
Taylor, M. J., McCormick, D., Impson, R., Shawis, T., & Griffin, M. (2011). Activity Promoting Gaming Systems in Exercise and Rehabilitation. Journal of rehabilitation research and dev., 48, 1171--1186.
[16]
Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2010). Experience-centered design: designers, users, and communities in dialogue. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics, 3(1), 1--123.
[17]
Zagal, J.P., Björk, S., and Lewis, C. Dark Patterns in the Design of Games. In: Foundations of Digital Games, 2013.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The Internet of BananasExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3582746(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Improving Motivation to Support Physical Activity Through Fitness App in China: A Co-design ApproachHCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-48041-6_44(654-673)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Values throughout the Game SpaceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35495206:CHI PLAY(1-27)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Games Against Health: A Player-Centered Design Philosophy

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    2546 pages
    ISBN:9781450331463
    DOI:10.1145/2702613
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. eat
    2. game
    3. play
    4. sit
    5. still

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CHI '15
    Sponsor:
    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI EA '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,520 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)70
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
    Reflects downloads up to 18 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)The Internet of BananasExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3582746(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Improving Motivation to Support Physical Activity Through Fitness App in China: A Co-design ApproachHCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-48041-6_44(654-673)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Values throughout the Game SpaceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35495206:CHI PLAY(1-27)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
    • (2021)Sally&Molly: A Children’s Book with Real-Time Multiplayer Mobile Augmented RealityExtended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3450337.3483498(80-86)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
    • (2021)The Purpose of PlayACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/343224528:2(1-40)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2021
    • (2021)The Bodies of TEI – Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied InteractionProceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3430524.3440651(1-19)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
    • (2021)Limited Control Over the Body as Intriguing Play Design ResourceProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445744(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2021)Exploring the Darkness of Gamification: You Want It Darker?Intelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-030-80129-8_35(491-506)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2021
    • (2021)Gamification Design Predicaments for E-learningHCI in Games: Serious and Immersive Games10.1007/978-3-030-77414-1_18(245-255)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2021
    • (2021)Seven Points to Reappropriate GamificationTransforming Society and Organizations through Gamification10.1007/978-3-030-68207-1_2(11-28)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media