Blowtooth: a provocative pervasive game for smuggling virtual drugs through real airport security

In this paper we describe a pervasive game, Blowtooth, in which players use their mobile phones to hide virtual drugs on nearby airline passengers in real airport check-in queues. After passing through airport security, the player must find and recover their drugs from the innocent bystanders, without them ever realizing they were involved in the game. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not, generally, regarded as playful or “fun”. This paper describes the game’s design and implementation as well as an evaluation conducted with participants in real airports. It explores the players’ reactions to the game through questionnaire responses and in-game activity. The technologies used in Blowtooth are, intentionally, simple in order for the enjoyment of the game to be reliant more on the physical environment rather than the enabling technologies. We conclude that situating pervasive games in unexpected and challenging environments, such as international airports, may provide interesting and unique gaming experiences for players. In addition, we argue that pervasive games benefit most from using the specific features and nature of interesting real-world environments rather than focusing on the enabling technologies

Blowtooth: pervasive gaming in unique and challenging environments

This paper describes Blowtooth, a Bluetooth implemented pervasive game where players smuggle virtual drugs through real airport security with the help of unknowing bystanders. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not generally regarded as playful or “fun,” and where people are subject to particularly high levels of intrusive surveillance and monitoring. Six participants who were travelling internationally within a two-week period were recruited to evaluate the game. Findings suggest that creating pervasive games that incorporate the unique features of their context as part of the game may provide enjoyable, novel and thought-provoking experiences for players

Sound for Fantasy and Freedom

Sound is an integral part of our everyday lives. Sound tells us about physical events in the environ- ment, and we use our voices to share ideas and emotions through sound. When navigating the world on a day-to-day basis, most of us use a balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses to get along. We do this totally naturally and without effort. In the design of computer game experiences, traditionally, most attention has been given to vision rather than the balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses most of us use to navigate the world on a day to day basis. The risk is that this emphasis neglects types of interaction with the game needed to create an immersive experience. This chapter summarizes the relationship between sound properties, GameFlow and immersive experience and discusses two projects in which Interactive Institute, Sonic Studio has balanced perceptual stimuli and game mechanics to inspire and create new game concepts that liberate users and their imagination

Gophers: socially oriented pervasive gaming

Gophers is an open-ended gaming environment which relies on location data, user generated content and player interactions to shape gameplay. It seeks to investigate social collaboration within localised and distributed gaming communities, the potential of pervasive gaming as a technique to collect useful data about the physical world and additionally, use of novel peer-judging methods to allow self-governing of the game world. In this paper, we introduce the game in its current state and provide an overview of early test results