Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 7(2); September (2020), pp. 133–136
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.k.200528.013; ISSN 2405-9021; eISSN 2352-6386
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jrnal

Research Article

Social Play Mediated by Playware
Luigi Pagliarini1,2,*, Henrik Hautop Lund1
Centre for Playware, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Painting Department, Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata, Via Berardi, 6, Macerata 405111, Italy

12ARTICLE INFOABSTRACTArticle History

In this paper, we describe a set of designs of social playware by using the Moto Tiles. We tried to demonstrate the importanceof the development of social playware by designing a number of social games that people can play together on one single tool.
The design envisions play that mediates coordination among participants. We make use of play that is physically stimulating,that is cognitively exciting, that can be changed by arranging diverse layouts of the tiles, and that is enriched by different sensor
modalities, etc. In all cases, the games and interaction designs are guided by the Playware ABC concept that is focused on
creating social play opportunities for Anybody, Anywhere, Anytime, by Building Bodies and Brains, and thereby by facilitating
the work of therapists and care workers can easily Construct, Combine, and Create new social play interactions to fit their
particular users need.

Received 29 November 2019
Accepted 18 May 2020
Keywords
Playwaresocial playplayware ABC
Moto Tiles
games© 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

1. INTRODUCTION
In the last 30 years, the interest of the scientific world about thegrowth and, oppositely, the declining of mental and physical healthamongst people has largely and constantly increased. We started
observing and studying both children and seniors, and theorists
have begun to develop theories linking growth and decline to either
increasing or decreasing opportunities to engage in play. A large
number of researches – in the areas including psychology, anthropology, education, sociology, and physiotherapy – offer a new blendof practical and theoretical perspectives that may shed further lighton this topic, while one single thing seems to emerge from all of thestudies, continuously. That is that free play in children accelerates
the growth of mental abilities [1–4] and that social play in adults
decelerates the degeneration of the mental abilities [5] besides also
improving their general attitude in relationships, mood, and physical strength. There is a large set of researches that demonstrate how
play in adults and elderly citizens relieves stress, improve brain
functions, stimulate the mind and boost creativity, improve relationships and your connection to others. It determines a general
sensation for people feeling younger and more energetic, besides
healing physical and emotional wounds. Despite of that, sometimes, to get elderly people engaging in social play can be difficult,and we believe some special settings and that some specific tools
could greatly help in reaching such target. Because of that, in thelast decade we have progressively increased our research on how tobuild play tools and games that facilitate social play by increasing
the level of communication between participants, and mediatingcoordination among actors. All of that it is not obvious, especially
Corresponding author. Email: luigipagliarini@gmail.com*

if such games and such tools have to engage and keep people fromany age on being continuously engaged and still require to be both
physically and mentally challenging.
In this paper, we describe part of the multiple field’s experiences
and observations achieved by running the Moto Tiles platform[6,7], a platform that we have constantly evolved either in terms ofhardware, software and gaming in the last twenty years, and that isin turn giving magnificent result in therapeutic, social and psychological terms. Finally, we also describe some of the most effective
social games obtained.

2. SOCIAL GAMESThe use of Moto Tiles for group games it is thought to be split in
two specific branches:(1) Cooperative Group Games (SGG), where a cluster of persons
pushes together toward a common target (i.e. usually,reaching a specific goal);(2) Competitive Group Games (CGG), where two or more groupscompete to reach a wider, larger, bigger or faster goal ina specific situation (i.e. usually, scoring points).
The two kind of games have their specific psychological, sociological, pedagogical, and therapeutic functions and impact. We will not
discuss that aspect in this paper although when considering socialgames, most likely, it is the most important factor to analyze.
Further, the above distinction is mostly theoretical since, sometimes, the very same game can be interpreted/played both in acooperative and/or a competitive way.

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As a final premise, it is to be underlined that, normally, in order toget CGG up and running, with Moto Tiles, we often need to define
how a group can be identified on the playfield. There are many
possibilities, but we usually use colors, meaning that each group isrepresented by a specific color.

2.1. Smash Group GameThe Smash Group Game is a simple game that can be played bothas a SGG or a CGG.
As a SGG, once defined the number of participants (i.e. three to max
eight for each set of tiles) it will be played with a number of tiles thathas to be larger than the number of players. Tiles can be positionedon the playfield both in an ordered and contiguous way or randomly.
Once the participants are ready, the game is started and at each cycle
the master-tablet will activate (i.e. turn on) a subset of tiles, equivalent to the number of players. To accomplish the sub-task given in
every cycle, each participant has to jump on a tile and keep pressing
the central button until all of the players are on all of the active tiles.
Every single cycle performance, if properly accomplished, will end
when all the active tiles are being pressed (i.e. an active tile shows acontinuous light, while an active tile when pressed shows an intermitting light) or, if there are some unpressed active tiles, when thecycle times out. As you can easily imagine, the group has to be as fast
and as accurate as possible. The average response of the group can becalculated over time and the master-tablet can provide feedback forthe group speed/accuracy, as a single parameter to refer to. If appropriately executed, the game itself can be very playful, funny and has agreat call upon social interaction.
The very same game can be interpreted in a CGG way. The only
real difference is the master-tablet has to be predisposed for running a number of groups (i.e. two or three) with a specific numberof participants (i.e. not necessarily homogeneous). Once tiles andpeople are appropriately disposed in the room, the game is started.
Of course, each sub-group will be identified by a specific color. The
game remains the same although the results will be, in this case,interpreted in terms of competition amongst groups, and the tiles
feedback and analysis will be presented so that there is a winner foreach single cycle and a sort of score for the whole “tournament”.

2.2. Colors Group Game
The Colors Group Game is another simple game that can be run
both on SGG or CGG modality, although in our opinion the cooperative one is the most appropriate.
In this game, each single player gets as identity a single color, which
will represent her/him both as a colored tile-target and as a coloredjacket or a handkerchief, or headscarf to be somehow worn.
For this game we envision three to max 10 players – accordinglywith the number of people in the group/s, the number of tiles athand, and with the number of distinguishable colors that can beexpressed (unfortunately colors perception also depends on lighting context of the playfield/room).
At each game cycle, the master-tablet randomly distribute a numberof lit up tiles so to cover all of the participants/colors range. At

that point every player has to run to its tile-target and disactivate
it as fast as possible. Essentially, this is a multiplayer version of thewell-known Color Race game on the Moto Tiles.
The feedback provided by the game depends on the chosenmodality. In the cooperative/SGG one we show the average resultof the group (i.e. in terms of timing), while in the competitive/CGG
we prefer to show the ranking of each group/color.
We consider this application at its start since there are many
possible variations of it to test, measure and eventually apply.

2.3. Patterns Group Game
The Patterns Group Game is one more game that can be used inboth SGG or CGG situations.
It is quite dissimilar to the two games presented above since itdoes not produce stimuli for the groups simultaneously, butsequentially. As for the Colors Group Games each group isidentified by a specific code that, in this case, is not a color but
a specific pattern shown through the tiles’ LEDs. A pattern, ofcourse, is a specific geometrical configuration of the lit up eightLEDs embodied in each tile, which can resemble a typical shape(i.e. circle, square, triangle, etc.).
The tiles can be freely distributed on the floor and the master-tablet
only needs to know how many groups are there and show, for eachof them, a specific geometrical pattern that will be the target foreach individual/group.
Each run/cycle consists of a number of reiterations during which
only a single tile, amongst all, will be lighted up with one specific pattern at time. All the patterns will be presented, in turn,but not necessarily in order, one after another. For example, if
we have 10 tiles, two group (i.e. A and B) with two patterns (i.e.
a and b) there might be 10 reiterations where the sequence fivetimes a and five times b is randomly chosen. (e.g. AABABBBAB,or ABBAAABAB, etc.).
At every reiteration, each group will have two target tiles. One is thematching-tile and the other one is the target-tile. The matching-­tile
is a tile proper of each group that must be specified at beginningof the game and is positioned close to one player, the matching-­
player.
Therefore, for every reiteration of the game, one target-tile is lit up
with a specific target, while all the matching tiles of all groups arelit up.
The first player/group which select its own matching-tile takes theturn. Indeed, the matching-tile once pushed will attribute, right orwrong, the specific reiteration to an unambiguous pattern/group.
Only after that smash/activation the target pattern tile can beswitched off. Consequentially, a reiteration can be considered finishedonly when both a matching-tile, first, and the target-tile, secondly,
are pressed.
The largest difference between the two former games and thePattern Group Game is that cooperation and attentional demandin the latter one is much higher either in terms of visual perception,or motor reaction as well as group coordination.

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The outcome of the game can be presented in different ways, therefore either as absolute hit/errors points scored, or as average reaction times for hit, or as a mixed component of all of them.
Other social play games include:

2.3.1. Jump jump
The Jump Jump Game for more players, where two tiles light up
and two players have to hit them at the same time. For instance,with 10 players each player has one tile, and with five players, eachplayer may have two tiles (Figure 1). In this game, the players haveto coordinate their interaction, so that they are in synchrony when
hitting the tiles that light up. The game was originally designed
as a one-player game for the player to jump on the tiles landing
with his/her feet in synchrony on the two tiles lit up, but the gamewas later adopted by therapists to become a social play for many
­players. This exemplifies well how the C of the Playware ABC concept allowed the therapist to construct, combine and create using
their professionalism to develop a social play which matched theirneed for a tool to mediate social interaction and social enjoyment
among the seniors.

2.3.2. Piano
The Piano Game where each tile with a distinctive color represents
a note. In the game a tune is played and each player has to hit
the tile in front of him/her to make the appropriate note (Figure 2).
Similar to the Jump Jump Game, also this game was originally

Figure 3 | Social intergenerational play on Moto Tiles by Culture Homesin Hong Kong.

designed to be a single player game. Similarly, with the Piano Gamethe C of the Playware ABC facilitated that the therapist could
easily construct their own new version of the game as a social playfor more users. In this way, seniors now group around the MotoTiles (Figure 2) and together they perform piano melodies such as
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and When the Saints Go Marching In.

2.3.3. Color race
The Color Race Game where up to four players are competing on
catching their color which jumps around on the tiles. Each player
has his/her own color, which jumps to another randomly chosentile when the tile with this color is pressed. The player who firstcatches 10 wins the game (Figure 3). This is the original use of thegame as either a single player or a multiplayer game. The therapists adopts this use also to allow users of different ages to performsocial play, such as in intergenerational play between kindergarten
children and senior care home residents (Figure 3).

3. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Figure 1 | The Jump Jump Game where players can both sit down andstand up while playing together.

Figure 2 | The Piano Game amongst seniors and therapist in Finland.

In this paper we described an initial set of six games to be run on
our playware platform, that point directly at eliciting a deep socialinteraction. Indeed, in our point of view, it is important to expand
the playware research to focus on the social interaction, so that thestarting point for the research and development becomes the socialinteraction mediated by the technology rather than the individualinteraction mediated by the technology. We can define social playware as follows: social playware is playware, which aims at creating
playful social interaction between several users [8].
We focus on such social playware because we believe, as almost all
the scientific community seems to be aware now, that social play
is fundamental for both mental and physical growth and maintenance. Indeed, there are many studies [1–5] carried on children andelderly population that show the multiple benefits of such an activity, improvements that go from the not concretely defined “wellness” to the more specific results obtained in the muscular, skeletal,
cardio-circulatory, respiratory, metabolic systems, as well as thenervous one in terms of cognitive and emotive apparats. Therefore,

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working on a technology that stimulate gaming and social interaction and that parallelly produce a deterministic level of automatedmeasurement in terms of behavioral response, it seems to be theright way to spend a scientific effort.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest.

[2]
[3]

[4]
[5]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank Massimiliano Leggieri for the help indeveloping the first prototype system.

[6]

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AUTHORS INTRODUCTION
Professor Luigi Pagliarini

Professor Henrik Hautop Lund

He is an artist with a strong neuro-­
psychological background that has become
an expert in Artificial Intelligence, Artificial
Life, and Robotics. He is a Professor at theAcademy of Fine Arts of Macerata, in Italy.
He has hundreds of publications and of quotations both in science and arts, and has exhibited his work all over the world, aswell as has been awarded of different international prizes.

He is at Center for Playware, Technical
University of Denmark, is WorldChampion in RoboCup Humanoids
Freestyle 2002, and has more than 200
scientific publications and 5000 citations.
He was awarded the Most Outstanding Healthcare Innovatorin the World in 2019. Over the last year, he received international awards in Tokyo, Singapore, and London. He has developed shape-shifting modular robots, presented to the emperorof Japan, and has collaborated closely on robotics and AI withcompanies like LEGO, Kompan, BandaiNamco, Microsoft,Mizuno. He is the inventor of the Moto Tiles (www.moto-tiles.
com), which are used by seniors all around the world.