DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Brunel University, September, 2009
Volume: 5
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
There are many new forms of entertainment in game industry. Often some of the forms are neglected in academic focus and research. Usually this is the case with marginal game forms. This paper will introduce two different, mobile device based game forms from the 21st century that are very successful among the users but are left out from the centre of game research. Qualitative studies of geocaching and SMS-to-TV human-hosted interactive TV games were conducted by analyzing the field of geocaching (by interviewing players and analysing geocachers’ web-pages and forums on the Internet) and iTV-entertainment (by recording sample of interactive TV-formats). These game phenomena were analyzed and discussed to answer the following questions: What kind of game culture these games represent? What new viewpoints they offer to the field of game studies? What are the reasons behind their success? What different dimensions can be found? Finally, why is it important to study marginal games and what can be learned from them?