InterRings: Towards Understanding Design Micro-games to Fit Daily Work Routine

 

Current game research mainly focused on recovery activities outside of the workplace during leisure times, little has been paid attention to gamify short-term breaks during working hours. Meanwhile, taking regular tiny breaks benefits workers regarding occupational well-being. These gapes bridge the conceptualization of “micro-games“ which is a contextual game that leverages short-breaks with works to provide timely rewards to its players. We further developed our concept into a working prototype InterRings and run an observational study to examine our concept.

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Supervisor: Stefan Kreitmayer, Yvonne Rogers, Nicolai Marquardt
Team: Marusa Hrobat, Gurdeet Singh, Zeyuan Zhang, Ziyi Zhang
Paper re-edited by: Zeyuan Zhang, Ling Qin

Extended abstract accepted by CHI2021 Late-breaking Works

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Micro-games —

We characterise micro-games as the game with simple game dynamics which requires minimaltime and effort to play. Crucially, it bridges play and non-playactivities through gamification of short breaks. Minimal time toplay means that the game should have an easy-to-join and easy-to-stop game mechanism. The game should be simple and intuitiveto play, thus do not hinder the priority of work. The least effort to play refers to the least switching cost between enjoying playful micro-breaks and resuming previous work.

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InterRings —

Our idea derived from the classical handheld water-ring game in which the player manipulates water flow inside a plastic tank and aim to stack all colourful rings on the pegs. InterRings, as a ubiquitous version of the classical water-ring game, was added more sustainable features to make it adapt to micro-games characteristics. Instead of pushing the buttons, players can play the game with arbitrary office objects (e.g. pen/glass clicking) or gestures (e.g. tapping, snapping, stomping). A sound-based model would analyses the inputs objects and gestures to activate the game.

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Fabrication —

The functional prototype contains two parts: The machine learning algorithm for sound recognition and interactive mechanism to press the buttons. The mechanism consists of Arduino UNO and two attached servos (SG92S) which are connected to the connected 13 inch laptop (XPS 13 9370). Sounds are first received by the laptop microphone and then analysed by Google’s Teachable Machine, an open source machine learning platform. These are then assigned to either left or right servo according to the pre-defined classification.

 
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Methodology —

Five participants (2 male and 3 female) from a local business consulting institution were volunteering recruited for participation. To understand and evaluate participants interaction cycle, subjects were provided with the interactive prototype during 30 minutes working cycle, and their work and play behaviour were recorded for further analysis. We kept a log of what events motivated them to play, when they play, and the duration of play. Afterwards, subjects were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview to help researchers understand their motivations, barriers, and comments on our micro-games concept.

 

Conclusion —

The mixed observational and semi-structured interview study demonstrated great feasibility and high acceptability of our micro-games concept. Further, we summarise three design guidelines for micro-games design:

1️⃣ Introducing intuitive yet slightly "fricative" game mechanisms to ensure easy game entry and quit. To limit game interaction time and avoid addiction,we recommend introducing certain levels of friction to inten-tionally break interaction flows.

2️⃣ Gamification only at the designated occasion and do not hinder primary work. The game itself should be served aslubricants but not distractions of the workflow.

3️⃣ Compliance to worksite restrictions. This requires the result-ing games to be non-obtrusive to all people in the sharedworkplace including players and non-players. This in re-turn calls for sparingly use of visual, auditory, and tactilefeedback

 

For more information, view our paper at:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451733