Interruption and pausing of public display games

We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of interruptions of interaction with a public display game, and explore the use of a manual pause mode in this scenario. In previous public display installations we observed users frequently interrupting their interaction. To explore ways of supporting such behavior, we implemented a gesture controlled multiuser game with four pausing techniques. We evaluated them in a field study analyzing 704 users and found that our pausing techniques were eagerly explored, but rarely used with the intention to pause the game. Our study shows that interactions with public displays are considerably intermissive, and that users mostly interrupt interaction to socialize and mainly approach public displays in groups. We conclude that, as a typical characteristic of public display interaction, interruptions deserve consideration. However, manual pause modes are not well suited for games on public displays. Instead, interruptions should be implicitly supported by the application design.