An Impact Study of the Design of Exergaming Parameters on Body Intensity from Objective and Gameplay-Based Player Experience Perspectives, Based on Balance Training Exergame

Based on Balance Training Exergame. PLoS ONE 8(7): e69471. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069471 An Impact Study of the Design of Exergaming Parameters on Body Intensity from Objective and Gameplay-Based Player Experience Perspectives, Based on Balance Training Exergame Tien-Lung Sun. 0 Chia-Hsuan Lee 0 Mel Slater, ICREA-University of Barcelona, Spain 0 Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Yuan-Ze University , Taoyuan, Taiwan, ROC Kinect-based exergames allow players to undertake physical exercise in an interactive manner with visual stimulation. Previous studies focused on investigating physical fitness based on calories or heart rate to ascertain the effectiveness of exergames. However, designing an exergame for specific training purposes, with intensity levels suited to the needs and skills of the players, requires the investigation of motion performance to study player experience. This study investigates how parameters of a Kinect-based exergame, combined with balance training exercises, influence the balance control ability and intensity level the player can tolerate, by analyzing both objective and gameplay-based player experience, and taking enjoyment and difficulty levels into account. The exergame tested required participants to maintain their balance standing on one leg within a posture frame (PF) while a force plate evaluated the player's balance control ability in both static and dynamic gaming modes. The number of collisions with the PF depended on the frame's travel time for static PFs, and the leg-raising rate and angle for dynamic PFs. In terms of center of pressure (COP) metrics, significant impacts were caused by the frame's travel time on MDIST-AP for static PFs, and the leg-raising rate on MDIST-ML and TOTEX for dynamic PFs. The best static PF balance control performance was observed with a larger frame offset by a travel time of 2 seconds, and the worst performance with a smaller frame and a travel time of 1 second. The best dynamic PF performance was with a leg-raising rate of 1 second at a 45-degree angle, while the worst performance was with a rate of 2 seconds at a 90-degree angle. The results demonstrated that different evaluation methods for player experience could result in different findings, making it harder to study the design of those exergames with training purposes based on player experience. - . These authors contributed equally to this work. Exergaming is envisioned to be capable of merging fun from the gaming side with potential health and wellness benefits, enabling players to undertake physical exercise in a pleasant and interesting environment [1]. Exergaming allows the player to enjoy the game in an interactive manner by means of visual stimulation, and thus makes them perform physical activities. In addition, exergaming is not limited to time, space, or any issues regarding gaming partners. Individuals are free to undertake physical exercise at their own pace by immersing themselves in the exergame, in terms of both their visual sense and body. Confronted with a game scene that requires full-body movement, players are able to interact with the game, which in turn responds to the players movement [14]. In terms of the benefits that it has on health, exergaming integrates physical exercise with video games, therefore significantly inspiring enthusiasm for undertaking exercise and improving the fun of exercise [23]. Not only do exergames enable players to do physical exercise at home with great enjoyment, they also overcome any time and space limitations that are associated with traditional exercise. Equipment for exergames can be classified into four main categories; exercise bikes, foot operated pads, motion sensors, and other physically interactive games [45]. Among them, motion sensors have been widely available on the market, such as Sony PlayStation Move [6], Nintendo Wii [7], and Kinect Xbox [8]. Kinect does not require any hand-held remote control device, but instead it uses 3D depth sensing technology to detect the movement and position of the player. This is different from the aforementioned Wii and Move, both of which require an infrared remote control device to communicate with the master machine for positioning and movement detection. Although the infrared remote controller has an integrated three-axis accelerometer, its sensing effectiveness is limited due to the fact that the player can play with the remote controller in a lazy manner, and cheat the sensing device by undertaking the minimum amount of physical exercise [9]. To play the Wii balance board exergame, for example, the only thing that the player needs to do is to lift their feet slightly above the balance board in order to control the avatar. Previous studies on designing effective balance-training programs based on virtual reality technology as well as exergaming can be divided into two streams. The first stream is focused on investigating the impact of different display patterns on the balance control performance of the experimental subject, whereas the second stream is mainly focused on examining how the design of game parameters influences the performance of balance control. To elaborate on this in greater detail, the first research perspective is normally based on displaying the virtual reality scene to the subject to evaluate the player experience for different display settings, where no interactions with objects in the scene take place [1012]. The second perspective studies the balance control performance for different game parameters by varying the parameter settings and assessing the players body-sway level [1314].The body-sway level is represented by the maximum sway distance of the body along the anterior-posterior and the mediolateral directions, if the experimental subject is balanced. However, the impact of changes in game parameters followed by intensity changes in visual stimulation on the balance control ability of the experimental subject has not been studied. The attractiveness of a game is that it is fun to play. A game needs to provide multiple difficulty levels for players, and simultaneously ensure that the level of challenge increases as the player progresses through game to increase their skill level [15]. Exergaming takes the individuality of the player into account and enables the player to customize the game to meet their own individual preference, which is an indispensable factor to add more fun in the form of entertainment as well as more motivation for playing. Many previous studies have sorted the players into classes based on theories of psychology [1618], and proposed the direction in which the game would be developed. However, the objective of this study is to investigate the impact of game parameters on player experience based on an example of a balance exergame, which has been addressed in few existing works. Sinclair et al. [4] have proposed a model, referred to as the dual flow model, for the devel (...truncated)