HIPPA: Smart Wearables for Enriching the Gameplay of a Traditional Tag Game

Abstract

Nowadays children are more and more focused on playing social games with their peers through technological devices staying most of the time immobile indoors. Pervasive games and location-based mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, have a stand against this negative phenomenon as gameplay takes place outdoors with the city as the game arena. However, there are still many possibilities to encourage children to actually play together outdoors and simultaneously challenge themselves to fitness gain via physical exercise as they used to do in the traditional social outdoor games, such as tag game. In this work in progress paper, we aim on adding challenge to the gameplay as well as enriching the haptic player and social experience of the tag game by design, crafting and implementation of a two-piece social gaming wearable, HIPPA (figure 1 a-c). HIPPA is aimed to offer a more competitive and fun tag player experience.