Adapting playware to multiple players

With the creation of playware as intelligent hardware and software that creates play, it is possible to adapt the play tool to the individual user, and even to multiple users playing at the same time with the play tool. In this paper, we show how it is possible to implement adaptivity in modular playware, and allow the playware to adapt to the user´s level of competency in multi-player games.

The games are physically interactive games where users may have different levels of competencies due to different physical abilities e.g. between age groups and genders. Indeed, the work gives evidence to such differences, and argues that adaptivity is needed to make games fit to the individual users in both single-player games and multi-player games.

As a case study, we implemented such adaptivity on modular interactive tiles for the single-user game ColorTimer, and for the multiple-user games PingPong, in which two players are competing against each other. In the game, the speed will change to fit the level of the individual player, so that the game may be faster for one player, and slower for the opponent player to match the level of the player, so that each player is challenged at or just above the players’ level of competency.