Advances in emerging technologies, such as on-body mechanical actuators and electrical muscle stimulation, have allowed computers to take control over our bodies. This presents opportunities as well as challenges, raising fundamental questions about agency and the role of our bodies when interacting with technology. To advance this research field as a whole, we brought together expert perspectives in a week-long seminar to articulate the grand challenges that should be tackled when it comes to the design of computers’ control over our bodies. These grand challenges span technical, design, user, and ethical aspects. By articulating these grand challenges, we aim to begin initiating a research agenda that positions bodily control not only as a technical feature but as a central, experiential, and ethical concern for future human–computer interaction endeavors.

Interest in combining interactive play and the human body, using “bodily play” systems, is increasing. While these systems primarily prioritize a player's control over their bodily actions, we see intriguing possibilities in the pursuit of “limited control over the body” as an intriguing design resource for bodily play systems. In this paper, we use three of our bodily play systems to illustrate how designers can engage with limited control over the body by varying the player's degree of indirect control (for instance, via other bodily activity and external triggers). We also propose four strategies for employing limited control over the body: Exploration, Reflection, Learning and Embracement. We hope our own work and the strategies developed from it will assist designers to employ limited control over the body, ultimately helping people benefit from engaging their bodies through play.

Many people enjoy “vertigo” sensations caused by intense playful bodily activities such as spinning in circles, and riding fairground rides. Game scholar Caillois calls such experiences “vertigo play,” elucidating that these enjoyable activities are a result of confusion between sensory channels. In HCI, designers are often cautious to avoid deliberately causing sensory confusion in players, but we believe there is an opportunity to transition and extend Caillois’ thinking to the digital realm, allowing designers to create novel and intriguing digital bodily experiences inspired by traditional vertigo play activities. To this end, we present the Digital Vertigo Experience framework. Derived from four case studies and the development of three different digital vertigo experiences, this framework aims to bring the excitement of traditional vertigo play experiences to the digital world, allowing designers to create more engaging and exciting body-based games, and provides players with more possibilities to enjoy novel and exciting play experiences.

When we use digital systems to stimulate the senses, we typically stimulate only a subset of users' senses, leaving other senses stimulated by the physical world. This creates potential for misalignment between senses, where digital and physical stimulation give conflicting signals to users. We synthesize knowledge from HCI, traditional entertainments, and underlying sensory science research relating to how senses work when given conflicting signals. Using this knowledge we present a design dimension of sensory alignment, and show how this dimension presents opportunities for a range of creative strategies ranging from full alignment of sensory stimulation, up to extreme conflict between senses.

Recent HCI work on digital games highlighted the advantage for designers to take on a 1st person perspective on the human body (referring to the phenomenological "lived" body) and a 3rd person perspective (the material "fleshy" body, similar to looking in the mirror). This is useful when designing bodily play, however, we note that there is not much game design discussion on the 2nd person social perspective that highlights the unique interplay between human bodies. To guide designers interested in supporting players to experience their bodies as play, we describe how game designers can engage with the 2nd person social perspective through a set of design tactics based on four of our own play systems. With our work, we hope we can aid designers in embracing this 2nd person perspective so that more people can benefit from engaging their bodies through games and play.

Games research in HCI is continually interested in the human body. However, recent work suggests that the field has only begun to understand how to design bodily games. We propose that the games research field is advancing from playing with digital content using a keyboard, to using bodies to play with digital content, towards a future where we experience our bodies as digital play. To guide designers interested in supporting players to experience their bodies as play, we present two phenomenological perspectives on the human body (Körper and Leib) and articulate a suite of design tactics using our own and other people's work. We hope with this paper, we are able to help designers embrace the point that we both "have" a body and "are" a body, thereby aiding the facilitation of the many benefits of engaging the human body through games and play, and ultimately contributing to a more humanized technological future.

Vertigo can be described as an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. Vertigo has, however, not been generally considered as a design resource and we believe it to be under-explored in the area of digital bodily play. To investigate how vertigo could be considered as a design resource in this context, we conducted a review of relevant literature and held a design workshop with nine students to explore the potential of vertigo as a design resource for digital bodily play. From our exploration we identify five key design themes that designers might consider when designing a Vertigo Experience. Through this work we hope to encourage designers of bodily play experiences to consider vertigo as a design resource in their games.