Text Blaster: A Multi-Player Touchscreen Typing Game

Keith Vertanen, Justin Emge, Haythem Memmi, Per Ola Kristensson

CHI '14: Extended Abstracts of the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (interactivity), 2014.

Text Blaster is a multi-player shoot 'em up game based on players typing sentences on a mobile device's touchscreen keyboard. Players attempt to be the last player standing by using the speed, precision, and timing of their typing to annihilate competing players. Our game utilizes a sentence-based decoding approach in which users type an entire sentence before our auto-correction algorithm infers the most likely text. Text Blaster provides an engaging and competitive game for use in investigating performance and design aspects of touchscreen text entry interfaces.