Motion-Based Game Design: How to Design Quality Movement Games for Wii, Kinect, and Move

by Katherine Isbister

Everyday gameplay was already revolutionized by the introduction of the Wii, and in the last year, the rapid growth of multi-touch platforms, and the introduction of the Sony Move and the Xbox Kinect, have brought movement-based games into the limelight as a growing market opportunity. Yet, there is little or no information circulating for developers and designers about how best to design movement-based mechanics. Each team goes through expensive trial and error, as they work to adapt existing properties and genres and/or to invent new ones. There is a great need for a book that brings together what is already known about movement design, both in general, and for the specific target platforms, to help reduce risk and increase the likelihood of successful design. The book will include interviews with developers who have faced the challenges outlined in the book, and who have developed commercially successful and award winning titles. The companion web site will include video clips of play of the movement game examples from the book, to better illustrate the concepts. --Author, Katherine Isbister is uniquely qualified to write this book. She studies movement mechanics and their effects on players in her lab, presents this work at GDC and Human Computer Interaction conferences. Her lab's work has been featured in Wired.com and National Public Radio's Science Friday show. --No books available yet on movement-based games. We will be first to market on this growing and important emerging category of games. --Practical advice for designers on what work well in movement game design, based on real-world social science research and lab work. The book demonstrates a perfect mix of lab tested, practical advice, combined with case studies across many genres and platforms. --Companion web site offers video clips of play of the movement game examples from the book, to better illustrate the concepts.

250 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published May 15, 2013

About the author

Katherine Isbister is a game and human computer interaction researcher and designer, currently a professor in computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Isbister received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, with a focus on the design of interactive characters. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35. In 2011, she received a Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From 2014 to 2015, she held a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.