Update: Pervasive Gaming

Pervasive games extend the gaming experience to the physical world and allow gaming in the streets, offering a combination of tracking and location based interaction.

Trend Description:
We here at CScout are avid gamers. Fortunately we get to see the daylight quite a bit on our global scouting missions. Therefore, we love to hear about games that integrate the real world and don’t just keep you glued to that TV screen.

Last November we introduced a set of pervasive games played using your mobile phone in an outdoor setting: see Trend: Pervasive Gaming . The trend mainly stressed the fun factor of these location-based games which allow players behind their desktops and players on the street to form teams and compete against each other. Most of these pervasive games simply used cell-phones as transmitting tool, text and multimedia messaging.

Labs and universities are now also experimenting with Augmented Reality technology, enhancing the physical world with synthetic objects. Pervasive Gaming also opens up a playful way to research possible communication and social interaction of the future.

Cases:

Love City
Love City is a game about making connections. A first test game was launched in April by the Nottingham-based technology artists, Active Ingredient (authors of ‘Ere Be Dragons) in the cities of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. The goal is to form triplets, so called Ménage à trios, by sending “text-messages of love” to other players. Information of other players can be received when players move between mobile phone ‘cells’. Players who initiate such a triplet are awarded with avatars, known as “offspring”. By the end of this year the cities plan to broadcast a big-screen projection of the game in the main public spaces of each city.

NetAttack
NetAttack is one of the view games where the outdoor players are confronted with synthetic objects. The goal of the game is to destroy the central database of a big virtual corporation. Different teams are sent on a simulated treasure hunt where they compete for items that will allow them to decode a secret password enabling them to destroy the database. While the “desktop-player” supplies the outdoor player with information, the player outdoors actually has to run around to find and collect the hidden items. Information is transmitted via GPS-receiver. FIT Fraunhofer plans to extend the game from its campus to the public. A cell phone version is planned as well as the use of other alternative input and display devices. and to further develop the game.

Day Of The Figurines
The centerpiece of the game is a model town, where each player is represented by a small plastic figurine. The figurines are moved by hand but their character, their decisions and actions are determined – via SMS - by their players. During the 24 days (each day representing one hour of a day) in which the game develops, the inhabitants of the town have to deal with various situations, including the gig of a Scandinavian metal-band that goes horribly wrong and Arabic troops appearing on High Street. Depending on how the players respond to these events, they will create a code of morality within this virtual world. Participating players are 1000 residents of the city, who will receive at least one message daily, but can also check on a parallel website about recent events in the “virtual town”. “Day Of The Figurines” is a project by the British interactive media artist group Blast Theory and will premier in Germany in September 2006 followed by an international tour. A test-game was played in August 2005 in London.

Trend Impact
Pervasive gaming opens up interesting ways to take the technology and fun of gaming beyond the computer screen. Researchers, artists and technologists are working together to develop new ideas, strategies, tools and technologies to enable players to interact in real physical spaces and virtual worlds. These collaborations have already led to interesting projects, and will also in the future further new strategies of how we might interact, how social structures will be defined and how we will be able to connect our physical and virtual environment.

Love City

NetAttack

Day Of The Figurines

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