Gamifying an Exergame Co-DesignWorkshop — Playful involvement of experts in the design process o balance training exergames

Abstract

Exergames combine physical exercises and games. Thorough knowledge about the physical exercises is crucial in designing efficient exergames. Expert involvement in the design process, in this case with physiotherapists, is an efficient way to gather and retain domain specific knowledge for the design team. However, experts rarely have experience exploring design alternatives in a playful way, which is important when participating on the co-design of serious games like exergames. We explored the question: How can we involve experts to share and professionally explore their domain specific knowledge in a play-centric game design process? We present two co-design exergame workshops with physiotherapists. Based on lessons learned from the first workshop, we explored in the second workshop framing the entire workshop process as a game. We found that gamifying the workshop process into a design game provided a way to change the experts' effective-oriented mindset into a playful mindset. This article demonstrates some lessons learned from this process of creating and using such a method and proposes some directions for future research and applications.