Duel reality

Duel Reality is a digitally enabled sword-fighting game. It explores how we could create compelling exertion gameplay by intentionally hiding biofeedback from players, but not their opponents. In our game the data coming from your heart rate sensor determines where the opponent should hit you. However, you do not see this information yourself, so you will have to observe your body to estimate what your heart rate is doing. If players had perfect knowledge of their heart rate, they could easily defend themselves. However, since a player has no direct feedback from the sensors, their defence is weakened by their imperfect knowledge. Rather than trying to reduce the disparity between a player's physical state and their awareness of that state, we use our game as a platform to study ways to harness this disparity to create novel gameplay.