'In the Same Boat',: A Game of Mirroring Emotions for Enhancing Social Play

Abstract

Social closeness is important for an individual's health and well-being, and this is especially difficult to maintain over a distance. Games can help with this, to connect and strengthen relationships or create new ones by enabling shared playful experiences. The demo proposed is a game we designed called 'In the Same Boat', a two-player game intended to foster social closeness between players over a distance. We leverage the synchronization of both players' physiological data (heart rate, breathing,facial expressions) mapped to an input scheme to control the movement of a canoe down a river.