Guidelines for the design of movement-based games and their relevance to HCI

Movement-based digital games are becoming increasingly popular, yet there is limited comprehensive guidance on how to design these games. In this article we discuss a set of guidelines for movement-based game design that were initially presented at CHI 2014 (Mueller & Isbister, 2014). These guidelines were developed through reflection upon our research-based game development practice and then validated and refined through interviews with 14 movement-based game design experts with experience in the academic, independent, and commercial game development domains. In this article, we provide an in-depth contextualization and explanation of the research process that led to the creation of the final guidelines and discuss what human-computer interaction researchers and designers might learn from the guidelines beyond entertainment contexts. The primary contribution of this research is a body of generative intermediate-level knowledge (Höök & Löwgren, 2012) in the design research tradition that is readily accessible and actionable for the design of future movement-based games and other movement-based interfaces.