Combiform: a combinable social gaming platform

Combiform [see Fig. 1 center , video: 4-1] is a novel digital gaming console featuring four combinable handheld controllers. In particular, multiple players may freely combine and lock together their handheld game controllers, thereby creating a very flexible collective and transformable tangible interface. It can be understood as an emerging gaming system attempting to expand the co-located (the same confined physical space) social play experiences introduced by platforms such as Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect and Hasbro Bop-it . Most co-located video games direct players' attention to the screen but not to the other players. This arrangement counter-acts the natural affordances required for social interaction [1]. Combiform is especially designed to drastically improve co-attentiveness during co-located play. The system and its 10 games emphasize tangible body-to-body interaction via a flexible combining and decombining mechanism. This new interactive technique affords an exceptionally strong re-enforcement for player to pay close attention to other players. In addition to significantly improving focus attention, players could now feel and direct each other's movements and gestures via these tangible links between controllers [video: 4-2].