Pervasive Games

Pervasive games are games that are played in the world around us, rather than on a computer or mobile screen. The main attraction of pervasive games is that they are reality-based, drawing upon a real world which is richer, more varied, and emotionally and historically more interesting than any made-up game world can be. Pervasive games draw upon modern Internet, mobile and pervasive technology to create rich playful experiences in the everyday world. Some forms of pervasive games, especially location-aware mobile games and cross-medial productions with TV and Internet parts, form very rapidly growing forms of entertainment.

 

Pervasive games are a curious form of culture. They exist in the intersection of phenomena such as city culture, mobile technology, network communication, reality fiction and performing arts, combining bits and pieces from various contexts to produce new play experiences. The family of pervasive games is diverse, including individual games ranging from simple single-player mobile phone games to artistically and politically ambitious mixed reality events. Some of these games seek to pass time for a few minutes while waiting for a bus, whereas others create persistent worlds that go on for months and where players can adopt alternate identities and engage in intricate gameplay. Some games use high-end technology, while others can be realized with no technology at all.

 

Visibility and Social Expansion. Pervasive games are always played among people that are not themselves playing, and players will often interact with other players as well as with bystanders. This can be potentially problematic when bystanders are scared or confused by the game, but it is also an excellent introduction route to participation. Also, the public visibility of pervasive games offer opportunities for artistic and political expression offering opportunities for exploring pervasive games as public and performance art. We explore play in public space, deliberately emphasising play activities that are publicly visible and leave public traces. We also explore play in massmedia, studying the emergent interaction between pervasive games and TV, film, books and daily newspapers.

 

Deep engagement. Previous research in the group has shown the critical potential that pervasive games offer from creating deep player engagement. Games that rely on indexical activity (doing things for real) and immersive role-play create deeply emotional and memorable experiences. This offers opportunities for engaging learning experiences that are rare in other game forms. One goal for our research is to create example games that provide opportunities for deep player engagement in difficult issues; these are arenas for learning and reflection.

 

Tools for development and game-mastering. Game mastering has proven invaluable in pervasive games. The goal of successful game mastering is to strike a balance, where the game can respond to player improvisations and (in the case of pervasive games) real-world interventions without becoming just an open playground where anything goes. However, a huge challenge with game-mastering is to mix automated and manually controlled gameplay in ways that allow for large-scale games without losing the human touch that game-mastering allows. This, we address primarily through the development of tools that support authoring as well as orchestration of pervasive games.

 

Method: The project is planned to run for three years and will consist of three activities.

-       A cross-medial production. The project will engage in at least one large-scale cross-medial production with its partners. Through this collaboration, Mobile Life will get an opportunity to test its technology tools in a sharp setting, and given opportunities to study a large-scale production.

-       Game experiments. We will also undertake small-scale experiments with games that have been designed to study the core design issues. These experiments will focus on public play and deep engagement.

Technology development. Technology development will focus on the development of support tools for authoring and orchestration over a number of platforms and devices. The project’s main target devices are high-end phones with built-in sensor and positioning technology, but we will also explore the use of custom-built technological game artefacts and installations in the real world