Wriggle!

Creating a Platform for Dynamic and Expressive Social-Emotional Play

Katherine Isbister*, Rainey Straus, Jennifer Ash*

*Rensselaer (RPI)

Wriggle!

Motivations

• Gestural exploration of emotionLinking emotion and body for players, allowing a ‘language’ of gesture to emerge that could be used as traces in virtual environments.

• Games + art + research = …Using play to investigate social emotional dynamics and push the boundaries of ‘game’

• EmpowermentRepurposing consumer components and encouraging player authoring.

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Wriggle!

Background/context

• An ongoing arts practice using player content creation strategies in the Sims games to produce artworks (www.simgallery.net).

• Exploration of affective systems and their evaluation, in collaboration with colleagues at the Swedish Institute for Computer Science.

• Exploration of nonverbal communication in digital interactions (e.g. game characters).

Wriggle!

Demo

• Wii controller connected to Max/MSP/Jitter drawing patch

• Play with dynamics of the controller

• Looking for early feedback to drive control scheme design as well as visual feedback and game dynamics.