Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.)
My Masters project “Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.)” is now online. Falling somewhere in-between a thesis and design document, the project addresses the recent emergence of what has been called (among other things): Pervasive games, ubiquitous games, street games, big games, alternate reality games, mobile games, location-based games, total games, cross media games, augmented reality games, ambient games, location-aware games, mixed-reality games, etc. The primary failing of existing work done in this area is that it fails to identify and address the primary characteristic of this gaming genre: the appropriation of space for play.
As such, “Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.)” is an examination of the genre of appropriative games and its three sub-genres ubiquitous games, pervasive games, and non-computational big games.
Excerpt:
Appropriative gaming is a genre of games that are designed for environments not originally intended to accommodate them. Appropriative game designers study an environment (city streets, rural fields, virtual worlds, etc.) and create innovative methods by which to temporarily reallocate the environment’s natural affordances in the service of focused gameplay. The genre of appropriative gaming encompasses such works as Assassins, Pac-Manhattan, and ARQuake.
The frameworks that are developed to facilitate these gaming experiences are typically not permanent. An infrastructure for an appropriative game is often erected for a single game session and torn down as soon as play has concluded. It would be inappropriate to attempt to characterize this guerilla tendency as being either positive or negative for the genre. These flashpoints of activity may appear to inhibit the genre’s proliferation while posing a significant design challenge, but they remain principal to the genre’s aesthetic. Additionally, this pro tem inclination does not prevent the design of persistent appropriative games. However if the presence of an appropriative game significantly alters the permanent physicality of an environment, it ceases to be an appropriative game.