Off The Board: A Brief Definition and History of Pervasive Games (BGS Presentation, 2015) (original) (raw)

Blurring boundaries between everyday life and pervasive gaming

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, 2016

We present findings from an interview-based study of the pervasive mobile multiplayer game Ingress. Our study focuses on how boundaries between (1) everyday life and play and (2) 'real' and game space blur in pervasive gaming. We present findings on how the game is integrated into everyday life and affects players' mobility patterns, and on how players experience the relation between real world and game world, the game 'bleeding' into the everyday (blurring boundaries at least partially) even though it is not explicitly experienced as hybrid. Furthermore we discuss how notions of play versus ordinary life still affect some players, and how some players are willing to take and create risks and treat the game as consequential in their everyday interactions with (enemy) players. This further blurs the boundaries of the magic circle, but also creates tensions between casual and serious styles of play. Our findings add to the empirical literature on pervasive games by focusing on player experience in a large-scale pervasive game.

Pervasive games in ludic society

2007

In this paper we chart how pervasive games emerge from the intersection of two long-standing cultural trends, the increasing blurring of fact and fiction in media culture, and the movements struggling over public space. During the past few decades a third trend has given a new meaning to media fabrication and street cultures: the rise of ludus in the society through maturation of the gamer generations. As more and more activities are perceived as games in the contemporary society, fabricated media expression and performative sports pave the way for a new way of gaming. Born in the junction of playful, ordinary and fabricated, pervasive games toy with conventions and configurations of contemporary media.

Pervasive Play

Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016

The infusion of mobile and collaborative technologies into our everyday lives enables new forms of pervasive games and play. We use the term pervasive play as shorthand for technology-mediated, playful experiences that are tethered to our everyday lives through the physical and virtual spaces we inhabit. This includes a variety of game and play genres ranging from alternate reality games to urban games to mixed reality performance and playful uses of public displays. The goals of the workshop are to (a) strengthen and broaden the community of pervasive play researchers and practitioners, (b) explore design frameworks for creating novel pervasive play experiences, and (c) identify key research questions, methods, and challenges for future research in this area.

Live Role-Playing Games: Implications for Pervasive Gaming

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Live role-playing (LRP) games stand as powerful metaphorical models for the various digital and ubiquitous forms of entertainment that gather under the term pervasive games. Offering what can be regarded as the holy grail of interactive entertainment -the fully immersive experience -LRP games provide a tangible and distributed interface to a gaming activity that is emergent, improvised, collaboratively and socially created, and have the immediacy of personal experience. Supported by studies of LRP games, specifically aspects of costume, set design and props, we outline the interface culture specific to LRP and in which ways this culture may inform the design of pervasive games.

Notes on the Methodology of Pervasive Gaming

Entertaintment Computing, ICEC 2005, Fourth International Conference, Japan, Proceedings, 2005

The paper introduces four axes of pervasive gaming (PG): mobility, distribution, persistence, and transmediality. Further, it describes and analyses three key units of PG (rules, entities, and mechanics) as well as discusses the role of space in PG by differentiating between tangible space, information embedded space, and accessibility space.

Pervasive Gaming in the Everyday World

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2006

In this paper, we've made an initial attempt to explore the three dimensions of pervasive game play in the context of people's everyday life. Using an advanced prototype of SupaFly, a pervasive game developed by the former company It's Alive (now part of Daydream), we've evaluated how people perceive and play the game in normal, everyday settings. Our evaluation focused on how the players judged the designers' attempts to incorporate the three dimensions in the game.

Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games

Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency,capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date,in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable,safe,and pleasurable,the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society.