This is a response to this email from Markus:

Hi Markus,

I whole heartedly agree that the question is, “What is the purpose of classification?” My response is that, “we must classify in order to do more specific work.” It seems that everyone who works in our area has their own definition for ‘these games,’ and my primary concern is that the bulk of these definitions make good sound bites, but are thoroughly unusable when attempting to construct a greater theoretical framework. For example, a lot of definitions say that there is something intrinsically urban about these games and I disagree with that notion entirely.

Interestingly enough, I don’t see that IPerG’s approaches as being in any great conflict with my own- although I may be getting a head of myself. I believe that this genre of appropriative games are defined by the fact that they are designed for places/environments that were not originally intended to accommodate them. Now this definition can be approached through both schemas that you mentioned (issues of culture & distribution).

Culturally, these games are taking place in places where game generally aren’t supposed to be played. We see this in Norman Douglas’ London Street Games and when the NYPD requests that a checkpoint for Journey to the End of the Night relocates from the steps of a federal building. I realize the cultural implications reach much further than that, but they are not my immediate focus. Distribution is an interesting approach, but if you’ll bear with me I don’t think that it falls to far from my sub-genres (big game, pervasive game, ubiquitous game).

All games are at their core rule-based constructions. I really don’t anyone would argue with that. The distinction I have tried to base my sub-genre divisions on is who or what is administering, executing, and enforcing the rules of the game. The line that we like to draw at Georgia Tech is that an artifact (ludic or otherwise) is either computational or not. In my model, “the not” would be big games. I then divided the computational games into pervasive and ubiquitous games.

While this seems to be a simple question of tech, it is actual a question of cultural adoption of technology. Mobile technology is a great example to draw upon. In the US the cultural adoption of mobile tech lags far behind Northern Europe and Asia. As such when I design a “pervasive game” in the US that uses cellphones, I cannot rely upon anything beyond a voice connection and SMS. Without being an expert in Northern European mobile culture, I know for a fact that I could at-least MMS to that list for a game in your neck of the woods. In my view, pervasive technologies are naturally found in the area a game is to take place- which makes distribution a greatly simplified task. Ubiquitous technology, on the other hand, is tech that hasn’t been culturally adopted…which makes distribution/playability a far more daunting of a task. If we were to design a game using handhelds, GPS, and custom software, the chance of someone wandering along and being able to join in without being given equipment is zero.

I really don’t think anything (history or contemporary design) needs to be scrapped in order to move forward. I would love to see more encompassing models (as mine attempts to be), but people seem unwilling to generate them.

Best,
Dakota

P.S. For my own purposes I have defined an alternate reality game as an appropriative game that occupies two or more different types of environments concurrently (i.e. a real world location & a virtual world location).

Recently Markus Montola wrote a mini-review on my thesis as part of his on-going dissertation work in Pervasive Games. Markus is one of the driving forces behind IPerG and is one of the proverbial heavyweights in the area of appropriative gaming. Markus and I have struck up a dialog on the subject, and as long as he consents (which he has) I will be posting the exchanges here in unedited forms.

Hi Dakota,

We’ve been discussing genres a lot lately within IPerG, and found out two sensible approaches to “pervasive game” genre classification. Either you study existing games and gaming cultures and discuss the existing historical and popular ways of classifying the games, OR you build your own categories from scratch in order to inform design. The question is: What is the purpose of the classification?

Due to distribution issues, the former one is really hard to do with “pervasive games”: They’ve been reinvented SO many times over and over. You have locally born game groups like big games, alternate reality games and pervasive larps, which are partially overlapping, partially similar and have bunch of strange features other groups consider irrelevant. You end up with a game like Momentum, which perfectly belongs to all three groups, and game like Majestic, which looks like an alternate reality game but is not due to not being part of the ARG movement. Computer games have had easy and fairly global distribution, so genres such as platformers and rally games have crystallized very early. The ways of playing larps and “pervasive games” are too many to count or distinguish.

So you can take the design approach, asking what are the prototypical feature compositions that best serve as a basis for a designer trying to think about this new stuff. If you go this way, you may scrap most of the historical influences from your classification, and build an entirely new one. (Of course old practices, games and groupings should help you along). But if you go this way, I don’t think your three groups are informative enough.

So… where do you stand, in either of these approaches or elsewhere?

Best,
- Markus