Abstract:
In this work, we compare the exergaming experience of young and old individuals
under four difficulty adjustment methods. Physical inactivity is a leading cause of numerous health
conditions including heart diseases, diabetes, cancer, and reduced life expectancy. Committing to
regular physical exercise is a simple non-pharmaceutical preventive measure for maintaining good
health and sustaining quality of life. Incorporating exercise into games, studies frequently used
exergames as an intervention tool over the last decades to improve physical functions and to increase
adherence to exercise. While task difficulty optimization is crucial to exergame design, researchers
consistently overlooked age as an element which can significantly influence the nature of end results.
We use the Flow State Scale to analyze the mental state of young and old individuals to compare
constant difficulty with ramping, performance-based, and biofeedback-based difficulty adjustments.
Our results indicate that old individuals are less likely to experience flow compared to young under
the same difficulty adjustment methods. Further investigation revealed that old individuals are
likely to experience flow under ramping and biofeedback-based difficulty adjustments whereas
performance-based adjustments were only feasible for young.
