YomeciLand: Found Sound as Play

“We are two strong women” – Designing Empowerment in a Pervasive Game

Gender-aware design is important in computer games in general, and perhaps even more so in the design of pervasive games, as these are played in the ordinary world. As pervasive games blur the distinction between game and non-game situations, they influence the everyday lives of their players. We discuss the design process for the game ‘Codename Heroes’ from a gender-aware perspective. The focus is on how players reacted to the experience of playing the game during a sequence of design workshops. We found that playing the game made people less sensitive to ‘fear of the outside’. The participants were aware they ‘should’ feel unsafe in unknown neighbourhoods, but mostly did not. Furthermore, a combination of collaboration with internal competition fostered a sense of empowerment. Finally, we could confirm what previous researchers have seen, that women participants tended to blame themselves, rather than the technology or the situation, for errors.

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

On the Edge of Reality: Reality Fiction in ‘Sanningen om Marika’

The Alternate Reality Game genre inspires a mode of play in which the participants choose to act as if the game world was real. Jane McGonigal has argued that one of the most attractive features of an ARG is the ‘Pinnochio’ effect: at the same time that the players deeply long to believe in them, it is in reality impossible to believe in them for real. In this article, we study “Sanningen om Marika”, a game production where fact and fiction was blurred in a way that made some participants believe that the production was reality rather than fiction, whereas other participants found the production deeply engaging. We discuss the different participant interpretations of the production and how it affected the players´ mode of engagement. We also outline some of the design choices that caused the effect.

Tangible Pleasures of Pervasive Role-Playing

The traditional forms of role-playing include tabletop roleplaying, larp and online role-playing. In this paper I describe a fourth form, pervasive role-playing, which often follows many conventions of larp, but break out of the magic circle of gameplay in order to interact with surrounding society. The central pleasures of pervasive role-playing are related to playing for real, with the environment and having a tangible, unmediated experience of being a part of a complete and physical world of fiction.

Situated Play and Mobile Gaming

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

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.