Working notes about Robogame design

These are intended as working notes, to be shared and contributed by all the people involved in this activity, to define a basic framework for designing interactive games with autonomous robots.

A game involving the interaction with an autonomous robot is in a sense a computer game, since the behavior of at least one of the players is managed by a computer. The main difference w.r.t. a computer game is that there is a physical interaction between the players. This means that all of them will probably have to move in some way, and, in order to do so, they have to perceive some signals from the other players.

As for any game, it is important to define, as initial specifications for the game, who are the target users and the target environment to address.

Users have to be involved in the game. This means that the game should stimulate interest. This is usually obtained with something that is challenging, but not too difficult to be faced by the human player. (E. L. Deci, R. Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation - see also the work on [| flow] by Chikszentmihalyi)