Designing a Technique-Oriented Sport Training Game for Motivating a Change in Running Technique

Athletes often learn suboptimal techniques that place a ceiling on their performance or put them at risk of injury. Adopting a new technique can lead to a short-term dip in performance while learning it, which can be demotivating and cause an athlete to revert to their previous, suboptimal technique. To address the challenge of demotivation in adopting new techniques, we explore technique-oriented sport training games, which aim to improve sport skills by capturing behaviour and providing feedback that motivates adopting a new technique. As of yet, previous work has provided little information on how to design sports training games, and some early research suggests that immersive games may distract players, preventing them from being able to learn a new technique effectively. We designed a study comparing a baseline non-game training system with three versions of a running game, ranging from a simplistic text-based game to a 3D audiovisual game with motion feedback. We find that the games with more immersive elements were as effective as the baseline system for adopting a new technique but were preferred by players and improved their intrinsic motivation. We propose design considerations from these findings and provide new directions for researching effective sport training games.