Shared Bodily Fusion: Leveraging Inter-Body Electrical Muscle Stimulation for Social Play

Traditional games like "Tag" rely on shared control via inter-body interactions (IBIs) – touching, pushing, and pulling – that foster emotional and social connection. Digital games largely limit IBIs, with players using their bodies as input to control virtual avatars instead. Our “Shared Bodily Fusion” approach addresses this by fusing players' bodies through a mediating computer, creating a shared input and output system. We demonstrate this approach with "Hidden Touch", a game where a novel social electrical muscle stimulation system transforms touch (input) into muscle actuations (output), facilitating IBIs. Through a study (n=27), we identified three player experience themes. Informed by these findings and our design process, we mapped their trajectories across our three experiential spaces – threshold, tolerance, and precision – which collectively form our design framework. This framework facilitates the creation of future digital games where IBIs are intrinsic, ultimately promoting the many benefits of social play.