Wriggle!

Wriggle is a set of mini-games about emotion. Players wear wiimotes on their bodies and have to move in ways that express and evoke feelings in themselves and in others.

Gameplay links movement to emotion, using social psychological theories and results. Players re-enact these theories through their movements while embodied as the on-screen characters, tying together game goals and emotion awareness.

This experiment links research and understanding of the connections between movement and emotion to the design of movement-tracking-based games. Creating gaming experiments like this one will help to broaden the design palette for games to include interesting phenomena of emotion and movement such as emotional contagion and physical feedback looping, as well as take advantage of players' intuitive undestanding of how their emotions affect their abilities and style.

The minigames are also being designed to provide players with a heightened awareness of these phenomena, toward increasing their own physical emotional literacy.

Playable Demo
(for Macintosh owners with bluetooth only)
You will need 2 wiimotes, our WiiOSCUnity application, and the standalone Unity playable of the game.

Click on these links to get zipped files:
- WiiOSCUnity
- Wriggle Standalone

In order to play, you need to acquire the ID numbers for your wiimotes and add them into the WiiOSCUnity application's list of numbers. You can get these ID numbers by using Apple's bluetooth device manager, or by using a helper application such as Bluetooth Explorer. Use all lower-case letters and numbers and add your device's ID to the list. Select the first wiimote's ID in the pull-down address list in the Wii OSC Unity ap. Press the 1 and 2 buttons on the wiimote, and click the 'Connect' button in the Wii OSC Unity app. You should see movement in the display window as you move your wii around. Important: Leave this alone and now open ANOTHER Wii OSC Unity window (Apple key + N). Select your second wiimote's ID number from the pull-down address list. Press the 1 and 2 buttons on this wiimote and click the connect button on the new Wii OSC Unity window.

Once both wiimotes are connected, you can double-click the Wriggle application to run it, and then follow the on-screen instructions.

Note: the game looks best when run using 800 x 600 resolution, so when the Unity application asks you about resolution, please choose accordingly...

Enjoy!

If you run into problems, email us and let us know!

Credits
Unity 3D generously provided our project team with 2 licenses for project development.

Project team members include Professors Isbister and Lawson; Rainey Straus (an independent artist), and undergraduates Jennifer Ash and Corey Nolan.

Professional game developer and great thinker Steve Swink added fabulous ideas during brainstorming sessions. RPI Arts faculty members Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn also joined in some early brainstorming, and Curtis has contributed ideas for audio. If you helped us, too, and don't see your name here, let us know!