Playing for Real

“Travel Bugs”: Toys Traveling Socially through Geocaching

Games to Live With and Die For: Speculations on NikeFuel

It’s all fun and games… A history of ideas concerning gamification

The paper offers the first results of an analysis of popular gamification guidebook publications. Using the way these guidebooks consider digital games as a starting point, I single out three of the most commonly mentioned associations with games and put them in the context of the overarching ideas that infuse them. After discussing the relationship of gamification and 1960’s behavioral experiments in psychiatric wards, I outline the most important issues that the analysis entails for further research.

Framework for Designing and Evaluating Game Achievements

This paper presents a framework for evaluating and designing game design patterns commonly called as “achievements”. The results are based on empirical studies of a variety of popular achievement systems. The results, along with the framework for analyzing and designing achievements, present two definitions of game achievements. From the perspective of the achievement system, an achievement appears as a challenge consisting of a signifying element, rewards and completion logics whose fulfilment conditions are defined through events in other systems (usually games). From the perspective of a single game, an achievement appears as an optional challenge provided by a meta-game that is independent of a single game session and yields possible reward(s).

Breaking Reality: Exploring Pervasive Cheating in Foursquare

This paper explores the notion of cheating in location-based mobile applications. Using the popular smartphone app Foursquare as main case study, I address the question if and how devious practices impact the boundaries between play and reality as a negotiated space of interaction. After establishing Foursquare as a prime example of the gamification phenomenon and pervasive gaming, both of which require us to rethink notions of game and play, I will argue that cheating in location-based mobile applications challenges not just the boundaries of play, but also of playful identity.

Playful ambience

This research started in 2004 as a search for a pervasive game equivalent of Brian Eno’s ignorable ambient music, such as ‘Music for Airports’. Brian Eno explicitly stated that the attention of listeners might alter over time, from ignoring to listening intently to the music; the ambient music pervading an environment and creating a mood, "it must be as ignorable as it is interesting" (Eno, 1978) Listeners might come across the music and then choose to what extent they engage with it. Defining ambience, and ambient properties, was particularly challenging. The concept of ambience, especially when applied to games, was not immediately clear. Building on the definition of ambience developed by Brian Eno for music (ibid.), fundamental properties of ambience as applied to games were posited. These properties included ideas of different levels of engagement by players, different levels of affect, persistence of the game when players are not present and the context of the game (where, when, who). The game design research methodology (Dishman, 2003; Eglin, Eyles, & Dansey, 2008; Eyles, 2008b; Zimmerman, 2003) developed for this research was used with phenomenological methods (Krzywinska, 2005; Mallon, 2006) to determine the experience of players and hence throw light on the fundamental nature of games and ambient gameplay. Following research into experimental games (M. Eyles, Eglin, R., 2007a, 2007b) which were designed to contain high degrees of ambience as previously (theoretically) defined it became clear that many existing commercial games contain some ambient (sometimes emergent) properties. They are not designed to be played ambiently, but have properties that facilitate ambient play (see ambient properties above). The research with experimental ambient games enabled the development of a phenomenologically predicated ambient lens through which these existing games could be viewed. This lens was then further refined by considering the ambience of both the experimental and the commercial games; finally arriving at a description of key features of ambient play. Constant comparisons within and between different data, and back to definitions of musical ambience, were used to ensure rigor (Glaser, 1978). This paper focuses on the findings of this research into ambience in games, delivering a succinct and far reaching schema of ambience that has not only been applied to existing games but has some important implications for the design of future games, throwing new light on the experience of game players and in particular of the inventive, collaborative and ambiguous nature of game playing. The applications of this research are wide reaching, in particular due to the ‘gamification’ (Campbell, 2011; McGonigal, 2011; Schell, 2010) of many products and services. For example, the awarding of points and rewards for use of online shops (such as Ebay) and the vine growing display of the Ford Fusion Hybrid car to denote driving efficiency (hypermilling) (Squatriglia, 2009). These applications of game mechanisms are pervasive, having many similarities to the ambient gameplay investigated in this research. The findings of this research into ambient play within games clearly indicate elements and approaches that could enhance the experience of gamified products and applications. Further this research offers a new way of looking at games, including both pervasive and commercial video games.