Casual mobile gameplay – On integrated practices of research, design and play

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Hajinejad Nassrin Sheptykin Iaroslav Grüter Barbara Worpenberg Annika Lochwitz Andreas Oswald David Vatterrott Heide-Rose
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

The Mobile Game Lab is a community of players, designers and researchers of Mobile Games currently initiated from the research project Landmarks of Mobile Entertainment. As researchers we find ourselves in a quite complex, frightening and yet pleasurable situation. Our research goal is to develop a dynamic system of landmarks for pedestrian navigation by means of mobile game play. To achieve our goal, we have to play and involve other players, we have to understand the various facets of game design and research, we have to deal with different partners, and integrate their diverse practices. How to focus on such a project in a manner that the different forces involved move in synchrony with mobile game play at the core? Within our paper we introduce the casual mobile game cubodo as a first empirical instance of the lab for developing our approach and spelling out what we call the mobile game play cycle. More than other games, Casual Mobile Games defy traditional definitions of gameplay and related concepts of game design and research. Casual mobile games are deeply intertwined with everyday activities. To understand, deploy and deepen this connection the integration of play, design and research is required. Accordingly we found that cubodo was well suited to form the idea of the lab.

 

Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns

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Kam Matthew Rudraraju Vijay Tewari Anuj Canny John
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Poor literacy remains a barrier to economic empowerment in the developing world. We make the case that “serious games” can make an impact for these learners and highlight that much remains to be learned about designing engaging gameplay experiences for children living in rural areas. Our approach revolves around game design patterns, which are building blocks that can inform game designs. We argue that patterns are beneficial because they facilitate the reuse of existing knowledge about successful games, and can capture contextual information such as domain applicability that has evolve through iterative testing. We describe the design of three mobile games based on patterns and report on a field experiment with rural children in India that evaluated these games against games that were not designed with patterns. We found that patterns are decontextualized design tools that can both help and hinder good designs. We distill lessons on the contextual factors that designers must consider when using patterns to design for this user group. These factors include designing for fun by focusing on the gameplay process and not only the winning conditions, and taking the power structure in local communities into consideration in the game designs.

 

Situated Play and Mobile Gaming

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Grüter Barbara Oks Miriam
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

There is no other play than situated play. A game becomes situated via play activities. Without playing we have the mechanics of a game, the elements and the relations, the roles and the rules. Situated play emerges within playing when the skeleton becomes alive, the role becomes a person, and the abstract game system becomes a concrete unrepeatable gaming experience. For mobile games having permeable borders questioned permanently by everyday life circumstances the creation and recreation of the magic circle is decisive. At the core of the situated mobile play we found the relation of the player to herself, to the objective conditions, and to others.

 

Player Perception of Context Information Utilization in Pervasive Mobile Games

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Paavilainen Janne Korhonen Hannu Saarenpää Hannamari Holopainen Jussi
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Pervasive games combine real world and virtual game elements in game design. A player might need to find WiFi hot spots, move to different locations based on mobile network cell IDs, or to do certain tasks at different times of the day. These are just few examples how the real world elements can be utilized in game design. The possibilities for using this kind of context information seem versatile, but there is very little knowledge about how players perceive these features. In this paper, we describe a user study where we investigated utilization of multiple context information types in a pervasive mobile game. The results indicate that context information creates a new challenge layer to the game as the players also need to consider issues outside the game world. In addition, the players found context utilization interesting, but it should be carefully explained for what purposes context elements are used in the game design. If the players do not understand the connection between the context and the game design, the feature is not attractive. In our study, time of the day was perceived as the most interesting context information in the game because the utilization was straightforward and easily understood by the players.