Embodied Interaction in Play: Body-Based and Natural Interaction in Games

This chapter describes embodied interaction as a stance towards interaction design for games. It aims at informing game developers with bridging concepts between gameplay and different interaction paradigms that incorporate and focus on the human body (i.e., body-based, natural and tangible interaction). It highlights challenges, potentials and pitfalls of physical interactions and discusses the role of the human mind-body relation as a fundamental concept towards serious game interaction design. This chapter underlines embodied interaction in play as a promising perspective for game developers, that puts emphasize on the notion of humans as social and physical creatures with sentient bodies and highlights the relevance of this perspective for serious game interaction design as well as research in the field. One of the main challenges for researchers in this field will be to create meaningful interactions that internalize these concepts as integral parts of how serious games achieve their impact.