Towards the Next Generation of Gaming Wearables

Recent studies on gaming wearables show that wearables can contribute to the gaming experience by bolstering performativity, facilitating social interaction, and accommodating distinct interaction modalities. Still, these studies focused on contexts such as role-playing, casual, or festival games. Stakeholder-oriented research that explores the integration of wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have conducted an exploratory study through 6 participatory design workshops focusing on different aspects of wearables with 33 participants from different stakeholders. As a result, we have created fifteen design themes and three gaming wearable concepts that led to seven actionable design implications which can be adopted by designers and researchers for designing gaming wearables.