Benevolent Deception in Exergame Design

Abstract

Exergames are becoming increasingly popular as a way of motivating people to exercise. How to use games to increase personal exercise motivation has become an important issue both for HCI researchers and interaction designers. While many exergames can attract users, not all of them have the ability to sustain high levels of motivation over time. The incentive effect of exergames can not only rely on freshness and gameplay, but should adopt other long-term effective means. In most cases, exergames truly reflect the user’s status of exercise, as time, speed, heart rate, calorie consumption, etc. In the field of sports psychology, existing research shows that people’s cognitive bias in the process of exercise can be manipulated artificially, thus affecting the behavior and exertion of the athlete. However, it has not been found that the designer deliberately integrated benevolent deception into the case of exergame design. As a design concept, benevolent deception has not been widely discussed. We investigate how to apply benevolent deception on exergame design, to verify the possibility of using benevolent deception as a fitness incentive in gym. We developed a set of basic design principles, as promoting fitness by lies is an unusual and dangerous design attempt. Taking the spinning cycle game as an example, we try to introduce benevolent deception into the interactive game design of aerobic exercise. After the design process, we discussed the key impact, main challenge, necessary of drawing on expert opinions.