The practice of designing and creating alternative control (or “alt control”) games — playful experiences that use non-traditional input or output devices — has grown rapidly in academic and independent game design spaces in recent decades, with distinct overlap between the two spheres. Due to this close coupling, it is imperative that scholars working with alternative controllers or in adjacent fields build a rich knowledge of the contributions of other practitioners who may not always participate in academic spaces. Towards this end, we sought to build an understanding of contemporary patterns and practices in alternative controller game design and development through interviews with six members of a major event-based alternative control game development community in the United States. Themes that emerged included the importance of regular showcase events to maintain and structure the scene, the significant role event-based and regional communities play in ideation and knowledge sharing, a focus on spatial and embodied experiences, experimentation with a multitude of materials, and limited profitability as a rationale to create artistically-oriented experiences. Furthermore, interviewees described significant passionate hobbyist developer presence, experimental orientation, and a strong focus on in-person interactions, as well as a variety of potential futures centered on maintaining and growing the field despite inherent financial challenges of alternative controller development. As scholar-practitioners continue to examine the potential of alt controls to shape playful interaction, practices, knowledge, and ideas from the broader practitioner community can provide key support and considerations for alt control design in the academic sphere. This paper develops greater understanding of the practices of designer-developers actively working in the alt control field and promotes ongoing engagement between alt control designer-developers across contexts.

As alternative game controllers have grown in popularity as a means of crafting social, cooperative, and collaborative play experiences, designers have leveraged the flexibility in physical affordances of controllers to support a variety of social-collaborative games.At present, the existing body of works in this space offers a broad sampling of designs to support and promote collaborative experiences as well as descriptions of the effects of individual games or controllers on one or more aspects of social-collaborative play.However, the lack of a broader understanding of the relationship between controllers' physical affordances and the nature of the player collaborations they support limits the ability of designers and developers to make evidence-based decisions in controller creation to support desired collaboration patterns.As a first step to establishing such an understanding, we paired creative sense-making analysis data from four sets of play sessions using playful experiences developed for alternative controllers with descriptions of each alternative controller through the lens of previously established themes for collaborative alternative controllers.We aligned approaches to controller design to patterns visible in the creative sense-making data, noting potential relationships between some aspects of game and controller design and players' sense-making processes during play.We present generalizable design insights gleaned from this work, aiming to provide guidance that can support informed decisionmaking during the design process as designers and practitioners continue to explore the great potential of alternative controllers to support collaborative play.

As scholarly communities move towards fully realizing the immense potential of playful and interactive technologies, game-based behavior change interventions have proven to be effective in a variety of health behavior contexts. Due to the large number of stakeholders and the diversity of backgrounds within teams creating such interventions, it is vital that teams co-create and have access to shared documents, language, and understanding throughout the development process. Game Playbooks provide a critical tool to ensure unity between project goals, relevant theoretical frameworks, and game design techniques and decisions. These documents are co-created by and shared among the project team, connecting intervention goals and behavioral frameworks to game mechanics and assessment strategies, ensuring consistency between intervention requirements, design, and evaluation. Using the Game Playbook from an intervention surrounding hand and phone hygiene among caregivers of infants in neonatal intensive care units as an illustrative example, we offer insights into the development process for Game Playbooks and how our team’s process has evolved over the course of a decade of developing game-based behavior change interventions. This paper serves as a practical guide to crafting a living document through which intervention teams may communicate, share ideas, and develop effective game-based behavior change interventions.

Social interaction, and collaborative interaction in particular, is a core component of many games and other forms of play. While several forms of analysis exist to cover social aspects of play, many do not account for embodied components of collaboration during play. This paper presents our novel use of the creative sense-making (CSM) framework as a means of understanding embodied collaboration throughout the duration of dyadic, embodied, goal-oriented play. It describes the process of translating the framework, which had previously been used to study open-ended embodied collaboration, into a tool to analyze embodied collaboration in goal-oriented games. We detail key components of the analysis process, including codebook development, iterative coding to establish inter-rater reliability, and visualization methods to display trends across all play sessions with a game. This work demonstrates the utility of CSM as a tool for gameplay analysis as an addition or augmentation to existing techniques, and provides researchers and practitioners with a practical guide to applying CSM in games contexts.

Alternative game controllers — physical input mechanisms for interactive media that are distinct from traditional handheld controllers or computer inputs — are a continuing presence in commercial and academic games fields. Many of these works, presented at conferences, festivals, and public art outlets, forefront social interaction as a key component of the play they afford, supporting a variety of designs specifically aimed at collaborative play. However, despite a substantial body of work in this field, there is as of yet no unified framework for designing or conceptualizing collaborative games that use alternative controllers.