GameChanger: A middleware for social exergames

While the health benefits of exercise are wide-ranging and wellknown, the population of the United States is suffering from a lack of physical activity. We believe that combining elements of social interaction with exercise in video games will lead to increased and sustained engagement in physical activity. In this paper, we present an initial design of GameChanger, a middleware to support the development of a new generation of social exergames that interweave physical activity as a core game mechanic with social elements such as competition and collaboration. The GameChanger middleware provides programming abstractions that are specific to social exergame mechanics, elevating their description so that even non-expert programmers can create interesting social exergames that utilize mobile phones and sensing technology to integrate physical activity into gameplay. In addition, the middleware provides constructs for performing continuous assessment of physical activity during gameplay; these constructs can be used to provide feedback to the gameplayer or to collect datasets for evaluation by health researchers. As such, the GameChanger middleware can also serve as a platform to support scientific experimentation and exploration to determine which combinations of social and physical elements have the greatest impact on physical activity.