It seems like the big companies are really catching onto using pervasive computing devices for game-like tourism experiences. As reported by Engadget today:

The DS has already proven some of its versatility by ordering food and dishing out replays at Safeco Field, and it looks like Disney’s set to expand those non-gaming capabilities even further, with it now testing a system that turns the handheld into an interactive tour guide. Dubbed the Disney Magic Connection, the app appears to be fairly extensive, including not only maps of the Magic Kingdom, but details on wait times at various attractions, directions to the nearest washrooms and ATMs and, of course, the odd game. Unfortunately, at least in its current state, you’ll only be able to take advantage of those features with one of Disney’s pre-set up DSs and not your own — no word if that’ll change once the system moves beyond the testing phase. Hit up the read link below for more pics of the app itself and a first-hand report from one lucky tester.

Now from the sounds of this report, the Disney DS app sounds like it is actually a homebrew project by a very large homebrewer. My guess is that the Imagineers are doing proof of concept / beta testing before going through the arduous  process of having official carts licensed.

Joystiq’s report on the subject states that the Disney DS has GPS support. Following links, I have no idea how & where GPS got into the picture. Furthermore based on my past conversations with Disney Imagineers, I would be very surprised if GPS was actually used. They understand the problems of GPS development as much as anyone, and have shown themselves to be very willing to reach solutions through RFID & WiFi triangulation. So if the Disney DS does utilize GPS, it would represent a minor turn of the tides internally at Disney Imagineering.

Most of the time I pay little, if any, attention to the PSP. Simply put, I’m just not interested in what Sony has decided that this device is all about. Via a slew of announcements, this week and last, it now appears that Sony might be changing their mind about what the PSP is all about. Accordingly, I might be getting interested in the device as a pervasive gaming vehicle.

Here’s the run-down of announcements (via Joystiq & Kotaku):

• The US version of the PSP to get hardware, firmware, and software support for GPS…or you just hack it and add your own GPS support. (Is there a good PSP WiFi triangulation solution?)
• Skype coming to the PSP. (Skype SDK support?!?)
• 16GB MS Duo memory stick coming for PSP.

As I said, I don’t own a PSP and have never seriously looked at what kind of resources the PSP Homebrew community has to offer, but it may be time to invest and research.

Below is one of the Android Developer videos release by Google about two weeks ago. I didn’t pay too much attention to these at first, mostly due to time constraints, but I finally got around to watching it the other day. The video shows SkyPop principals Bruce Leak and Timo Bruck presenting what their company was able to do with Android during their first few days of exploratory development.

At one minute in, Bruck demos what he describes as a ‘team geo-caching game,’ that falls in line with our definition of either a pervasive or ubiquitous game. I still haven’t had time to get deep into the SDK, but if per/ubi game development is as easy as Bruck implies, Android might truly be the catalyst to the public proliferation of pervasive/ubiquitous gaming.

/awesome

As I’m finally getting down to reviewing the Google’s mobile Android SDK, I’m wondering if this is the nail in the coffin for OpenMoko (it isn’t a very big coffin and would only need 1 nail).

My thinking is this: I’ve been working on a appropriative /pervasive game toolkit, and have been holding off on moving into the dev stage until I had a chance to get my hands on the consumer version of the Neo1973 to what I could really do with it. The fact that the device has been continuously delayed has not helped OpenMoko in this case.

You might ask why would I even bother with OpenMoko in the first place. Well the pervasive game toolkit requires a fairly high level of API access to a device’s hardware functionality. While I realized that any OpenMoko version of the toolkit would only be demoware, I was prepared to use it until the mobile community came to their senses.

Now it appears that Google may have lead them there. I’m putting a lot of stock into the optional low-level hardware APIs that have yet to be released but based on what I am reading now, it looks Android will allow me to have my demoware and deploy it too.

…I still might get a Neo1973 when it is finally available, but I certainly won’t be developing for it.

Did Android cause anyone else to close the book on OpenMoko or am I the only one who ever bothered to open the book?

One of the biggest challenges in appropriative game design, is computational quantification of action. How do you prove something happened, and to a lesser extent, how can you objectively inform a computational structure that something happened?

It all comes down to the tag problem. Observe any game of tag, at some point there will be a disagreement about whether or not a tag was made. When I teach on this topic, my student’s first assignment is to develop a method to quantify a tag and then inform a computational shell of the tag. Their second assignment is to then have the shell inform all players that the tag has been made.

Typically I see different riffs on the same methods, but I’m always looking for more. I’ve also been trying to abstract those methods into general approaches. Now I’m biased towards pervasive gaming and utilizing mid to high-end consumer mobile devices so this list is influenced by that. …this is also a very raw, and incomplete, draft.

Approaches to Collision Detection in the Real World

Network Proximity: Essentially if while scanning for connections over an ad-hoc network, if Device A can “see” Device B for X amount of time, a tag is made.

I’ve nicknamed this method “missile lock.” While using mobile devices and Bluetooth, I’ve found that the tag radius is ~30 yards and a time period of ~30 seconds of continued presence to establish the tag works fairly well.

Optical Recognition- Scan: If Player A is able to optically scan a barcode/glyph on Player B with his/her mobile device, a tag is made.

I’ve played with this one a lot, and have observed some interesting emergent behaviors. Before I get ahead of myself, I generally use Shotcodes linking to Php/AJAX websites to make the mechanic work.

The interesting emergent behaviors I mentioned generally are all a reaction to the Shotcode client’s effective range on mobile devices. First of all, the client doesn’t support zoom. A colleague of mine hacked the client and enabled zoom, but doing so greatly degraded scanning performance. Regardless, the effective scanning range of a Shotcode-enabled device is ~2 feet or less for a Shotcode with a 1-2 inch radius. As you would imagine, range increases as the size of the Shotcode increases. I haven’t worked out a specific size to range relational table yet, but how big are you going to make a Shotcode if you are planning to stick it on a player?

So in an interesting reaction to the limited effective scan range of the majority of Shotcode-enabled devices, innovative players actually used digitial SLR cameras to take snap photos of targeted shotcodes from long range and then scanned them off of the SLR’s LCD screen. Rather than outlaw this mechanic, I’ve decided to embrace it in my games.

Optical Recognition- Photo Recognition: I’m including this because it inevitable gets brought up in conversations. The base mechanic is that if Player A is able to take a recognizable picture of Player B, a tag is made.

I’m not a fan of this method because simply because it is in-exact. I’ve yet to work with affordable and/or reliable facial recognition software with which to automate this task. You can leave it to a human referee, and that is a legitimate low-tech approach, but I just haven’t found it to be a very interesting mechanic in practice. Granted after a few mundane tests I’ve pretty much shelved the idea, but I haven’t seen anyone else do it in an interesting fashion.

Physical Tag- “The Button”: A few times we had the idea of attaching a button of sorts to players. The idea was a tag would be made if some chased them down and pushed the button. After this resulted in a gang tackle or two, we moved one.

Physical Tag w/ Consensual Reporting: Saving the best for last (in this post at least), this tagging mechanic has worked the best in the most situations I’ve tried it in. Under this model, players tag each other in the same way they’ve been tagging each other since they started playing tag…physically, with their hands.

So Player A chases down Player B and tags him/her. Player A sends an SMS to the game server that reads, “Tagged B.” The game software then moves both players into a ‘purgatory’ queue until the tagged is resolved. If Player B agrees that a tag was made, he/she would SMS the server “Tagged By A.” If Player B disagreed with the tag, both players remain in purgatory until Player B consents to the tag or Player A withdraws the tag by texting “Untag B” to the server.

…so that’s my short list, does anyone have any other interesting mechanics they are experimenting with?

In about a week and a half, Come Out & Play 2007 will kick-off as part of PICNIC ‘07 in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I am not able to make the festival due to scheduling issues, but past collaborators David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have a game so Georgia Tech will be proudly represented. Hopefully my accepted entry Disavow! will find its way into to CO&P ‘08 this coming spring in NYC.

Out of curiosity I surveyed this year’s entries based on my sub-genres for appropriative games (list below), and was surprised at what I found. Given the perceived mobile sophistication of Europe compared to the US, I expected a large percentage of games to heavily leverage mobile and fall into the realm of pervasive prototyping/ubiquitous gaming. Now while a few of the games do leverage higher end mobile features (the Nokia N95 seems popular), just as many employed no computation at all. In fact, I would go as far as to wager that the big games will be the stars of the festival.

I’m hoping to get a few on site reports, and will post them if they come in.

Big Games

• Bocce Drift
• Censorsh**
• CounterSquirt
• Human Snake
• Manila
• People Watching
• Safari

Pervasive Games

• 3001
• CollecTic
• FUSE INVASION
• Lumenatio
• Navball
• OMMRPG
• Snap Shot City
• The Target

Ubiquitous Games

• Can You See Me Now?
• de Pong

Alternate Reality Games

• TAH II

Markus Montola, who might well be described as the Godfather of European Pervasive Appropriative Games, had a few kind words for my thesis Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.).

Other than the fact that the curse of Dakota Fanning has struck again (he refers to me as a she), Markus raised a few points of contention that I would like to address. Unfortunately, Markus’ website doesn’t allow for comments so I’ll address his concerns here.

Of course I disagree with many things presented in here. One of them is the classification of appropriative games to big, ubiquitous and pervasive games. I agree with the argument that we need to classify these things into more elaborate sub-groups, but I don’t agree with the division made here; Brown’s categories basically boil down to “no tech”, “user-owned tech” and “game operator provided tech”. The distinction is useful, but not sufficient as a genre classification.

The speed at which one can be bogged down while discussing genre is amazing, so I will keep this a brief and as to the point as possible. A genre is simply a category of composition belonging to a greater taxonomy. In constructing my genre system, I tried to answer two questions:

1. What do these games do?
2. How do they go about doing that?

These games erect a representational layer of play over existing space without significantly altering the physicality of that space. Everything one might layer on top of this (real vs. virtual space, 1 player vs. many players, etc), are really well-passed the core of the experience. These games appropriate space and then relinquish it physically unaffected by the gameplay.

This “representational layer of play” is either constructed through computation or non-computational means. I choose the term big games to represent the non-computational ones. I’ll admit that this term isn’t optimal, but this application reflects the rhetoric of its popular usage. The non-computational games big games received the least amount of attention in my treatment, and really do warrant a greater investigation.

I devoted most of my efforts to the games that constructed their “representational layers of play” computationally. For a starting point, I relied greatly on Jane McGonigal’s This Might Be A Game. I became fairly invested in looking at how game theorists on the humanities side of things viewed the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” versus how game theorists / computer scientists viewed the terms. I’m not going summarize that section here, but it did allow to me arrive at what I think is a valuable distinction.

Pervasive games are games that rely upon computational technology that has already been dispersed through the appropriated environment. On the other hand, ubiquitous game rely upon computational technology that must first be introduced to said environment.

Not to be short, but reducing this distinction to “user-owned” and “operator-provided” completely disavows the historical computational context through which the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” were derived. I find that a lot of work done in this field relies too heavily on convenient adjectives and verbs. Definitions constructed in this manner often make great sound bites & blog posts, but fall apart under the slightest of theoretical scrutiny.

Which leads me to:

P.S. On page 49 Brown sees some unintended implications in my model of pervasive game: In fact I tried to express pretty much the same stuff she writes here. I suppose this is an unfortunate side effects of metaphorical models: They inspire creative readings.

I can’t blame Montola for calling me out here. The first part of my agenda was to call out and debug a few of the popular metaphoric models. It isn’t so much that I disagree with Markus as much as I disagree with several conclusions I have seen that drew upon his work in question.

Unfortunately, the second part of my agenda had to be cut from the thesis. It just wasn’t going to be ready. I’m hoping to be able to address it soon (I really need to finish Ian’s Persuasive Games first). Ian argues:

…that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. [He calls] this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.

I believe that appropriative games operate similarly, but distinctively differently due to the confusion in regards to the magic circle we are referring to. I refer to this new form as “procedural dialectic,” and will be expounding about it further in the future.

So…comments?

So even though I employed the term “big games” in my Masters project, I’m not a fan of it- especially when it is used to describe an entire genre (which I call appropriative games). In order to illustrate my hesitance with this term, I thought it best to examine a fairly composite definition of “big games.”

The particular definition I am using is from New Media Literacies Media Producer Profile Series. The 7th edition of the series”Learn About Big Games!,” includes interviews with appropriative gaming luminaries Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and Mattia Romeo. The definition itself, is found in a linked Word document.

Big Games:
Games for big groups of people in real world spaces (such as a park or the
streets) that use mobile communication technologies like cell phones to link
people together in gameplay.

Big groups of people… I have yet to be presented with compelling reason as to why the participation “big groups” of people would be a defining characteristic of play. How many is big anyway? If big is 20 people and only 18 show up, do you lose your big game license? I understand that 100 or so people doing something “weird” in public adds to the spectacle, but spectacle isn’t gameplay. If spectacle is something you are concerned with, I might suggest that you are more interested in performance than play.

Additionally, I believe that there is largely unexplored potential for single-player and small group appropriative gaming experiences. Let’s face it when the big companies come along and want to market appropriative games, the single player experiences are going to be the moneymakers.

In real world spaces… I’ve heard often heard the appropriative gaming movement referred to a “return to playing in the real world!” …some of us never left. By simply defining this gaming movement by saying its games take place in the “real world,” the primary operational quality of this medium is ignored. These games appropriate space. They are played in environments not originally designed to accommodate them, and do so with significant alteration to that environment. Whether this happens in New York City or in World of Warcraft is of little consequence to gameplay.

use mobile communication technologies… I think computation (well, the designer’s use of technology/computation) is a key attribute of appropriative games. Particularly, there are non-computation appropriative games which I will call “big games” until I can come up with a better term. “Pervasive games” are appropriative games that employ technology and computation that individuals most likely carry with them or have access to on a day-to-day basis. Finally, “ubiquitous games” are appropriative games that make use of technology and computation that most people don’t have daily access to.

Ultimately I think that most definitions / frameworks that attempt to frame appropriative games make good sound bites, but fail when one attempts to do more specific work with them. Furthermore if appropriative games are to deliver on some of their immense potential, more specific theoretical and conceptual work definitely needs to be done.

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.