requirements of the framework and give a detailed
overview of the technical concepts. Further on, in
section 4, we describe “Mobile Chase”, a
prototypically-implemented game based on the
framework. In the final section we outline future
work and draw conclusions.
2 RELATED WORK
Pervasive Games can appear in many forms as
described by Magerkurth et al. (Magerkurth, Cheok,
Mandryk, & Nilsen, 2005), the genres span from
smart toys over augmented tabletop games to a form
that he calls Location-Aware Gaming. Thereby the
approaches from different genres sometimes are
mixed in one system and bring up interesting
combinations that are hard to differentiate.
Location-based Games can be distinguished by
the fact that they use the position of the player in the
real world as a major input to the game process. In
these games the real world is seen as a game board
so they can be considered as the consequent answer
to ideas like Live Action Role Playing Games -
which bring classic Pen and Paper Role Playing
Games to life in events lasting several days -
Alternate Reality Games like “The Beast”
(McGonigal, 2003) - that use the full bandwidth of
modern media and communication technologies to
blur the borders between game and reality - and
modern video games.
A couple of games and systems have already
been developed coming from fields like research,
media art, or the industry. While last mentioned
according to Jegers (Jegers, 2004) only use a small
part of what the Pervasive Gaming paradigm offers
and are technically reduced to fit today’s user
devices, some of them are already quite successful
from a market perspective. For example the Tokyo
based game “Mogi, Item hunt” (KDDI, 2003) where
it is the player’s task to collect virtual items spread
over the city and to complete different collections of
items. Or the first commercial Location-based Game
“Botfighters” (Botfighters.com, 2005) developed by
“It’s alive” which appeared in 2001 and is about to
be released in version 2.0 where the user plays a
robot and has to solve missions hunting other
players. Both games can be run on standard mobile
phones supporting J2ME, using Cell-ID based
positioning methods.
The approach of Blast Theory, a group of
London based artists seems in contrast very
different. They developed a couple of Location-
aware Games like “Can You See Me Now?”
(Flintham et al., 2003) or “Uncle Roy All Around
You” (Benford et al., 2004) that come to life on the
streets as a sort of artistic event or interactive
performance. In contrast to the commercial games
mentioned before, these events take place for a fixed
time only with a limited number of participants. This
is somehow reflected in many details of the
realisation. Professional actors interact with the
players. In addition, as the devices are provided to
the players for the time they play, the technological
constraints to cope with are fewer than the
constraints commercial game developers have to
take care of, which leads to more sophisticated game
interfaces and a gain in the level of immersion
during play time.
Though Blast Theory collaborates with different
research institutes their interests seem to derive from
their artistic background in the first instance.
Therefore we also want to mention three
contributions made by the research community.
In “Pirates!” (Björk, Falk, Hansson, &
Ljungstrand, 2001) the homonymous classic
computer game from the renowned game designer
Sid Meier was brought to real life. The task of the
player is to “sail” between different locations,
representing islands, to search treasures and battle
near players all by using handheld computers,
WLAN and proximity sensors.
To prevent a virus from escaping from a campus,
the players of “Epidemic Menace” (Lindt,
Ohlenburg, Pankoke-Babatz, Prinz, & Ghellal,
2006), a pervasive crossmedia game, are equipped
with a variety of mobile devices - some of them
offering mobile Augmented Reality (AR).
Another research project dealing in the area of
Location-based Games was the publically funded
German research project GEIST (Holweg,
Schneider, & Göbel, 2004). The goal of the project
was to provide pupils with historical information via
means of edutainment. Virtual ghosts from the past
gave the pupils tasks by which they could learn facts
about the town history. Therefore the children were
provided with a wearable computer connected to
various positioning devices and a semi-transparent
AR-display on which digital reconstructions of
historical buildings were shown on their original
position together with the virtual ghosts.
As we can see, a lot of work has been put into
the field of Location-based Gaming, and a lot of
good ideas and systems have been developed.
However it seems that many implementations are
tightly bound to the implemented game concept.
Therefore our approach is a more generic one, not
focusing on the game idea, but on the underlying
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