Designing engaging experiences with location-based augmented reality games for urban tourism environments.

Gameplay has recently unfolded as playfulness in various cultural forms using mobile technologies. The rapid affordability paired with the latest technology improvements enabled the diffusion of mobile devices among tourists, who are among the most avid users of mobile technologies. The advent of mobile devices has initiated a significant change in the way we perceive and connect with our environment and paved the way for location-based, mobile augmented reality (AR) games that provide new forms of experiences for travel and tourism. With the recent developments like Pokémon Go and a prediction of 420 million downloads per year by 2019, the mobile game market is one of the fastest growing fields in the sector. Location-based AR games for mobile devices make use of players‟ physical location via the GPS sensor, accelerometer and compass to project virtual 2D and 3D objects with the build-in camera in real time onto the mobile game user interface (GUI) in order to facilitate gameplay activities. Players interact with the virtual and physical game world and overcome artificial challenges while moving around in the real environment. Where current mobile games withdraw players from reality, location-based AR games aim to engage players with the physical world by combining virtual and physical game mechanics in an enhanced way that increases the level of interactive educative and entertaining engagement. Despite some recent research on location-based AR games, game designers do not know much about how to address tourism requirements and the development of mediated playful experiences for urban tourism environments. This study explores the use of location-based AR games to create engaging and meaningful experiences with the tourism urban environment by combining interdisciplinary research of social sciences, (mobile) game design and mobile game user research (mGUR) to contribute to experience design in the context of travel and tourism. Objectives of the study are to identify the influence of key game elements and contextual gameplay parameters on the individual game experience (GX). To achieve the aim, the study has taken a pragmatic interpretivist approach to understand the player‟s individual GX in an evolving gameplay process in order to inform location-based game design. The project explores the interaction between the player, the game and the tourism context, which is assessed by a sequential triangulation of qualitative mixed methods. Two games were identified to be relevant for the tourism application that fulfilled the attributes of a location-based AR game. The first game is a role-playing adventure game, set in the time and place of the Cold War, called Berlin Wall 1989. The second game, Ingress, is a fictive, large area, massively multiplayer role-playing game that uses the real world as the battleground between two game fractions. A conceptual framework has been developed that presents the player engagement process with location-based AR games in urban tourism environments. The findings of the study indicate that gameplay is a moment-by-moment experience that is influenced by multiple aspects. The creation of engaging experiences between players, the game and the tourism context is related to six identified engagement characteristics; emotional engagement, ludic engagement, narrative engagement, spatial engagement, social engagement and mixed reality engagement. The study identified that the main motivations of playing a location-based AR game are the exploration of and learning about the visited destination, curiosity about the new playful activity and socialising with other players. Emotions underlie the creation of engagement stimulated by the alteration of playful interactions. The findings revealed that storytelling and simple game mechanics such as walking, feedback and goal orientation are essential elements in the creation of engaging experiences. Augmented reality, as a feature to connect the real with the virtual world, needs to create real added value for the gameplay in order to be perceived as engaging for players. The study proposes serious location-based AR games as an alternative form for tourism interpretation and has showed opportunities to enhance the tourist experience through self-directed, physical and mental interaction between players, the environment and the location-based AR game. The findings of the research illustrate the complexity of designing location-based game experiences. The developed conceptual framework can be used to inform future location-based AR game design for travel and tourism

User Experience of Geocaching and Its Application to Tourism and Education

Advances in technology have provided new ways of using entertainment and game technology to foster human interaction. Games and playing with games have always been an important part of people’s everyday lives. Traditionally, human-computer interaction (HCI) research was seen as a psychological cognitive science focused on human factors, with engineering sciences as the computer science part of it. Although cognitive science has made significant progress over the past decade, the influence of people’s emotions on design networks is increasingly important, especially when the primary goal is to challenge and entertain users (Norman 2002). Game developers have explored the key issues in game design and identified that the driving force in the success of games is user experience. User-centered design integrates knowledge of users’ activity practices, needs, and preferences into the design process. Geocaching is a location-based treasure hunt game created by a community of players. Players use GPS (Global Position System) technology to find “treasures” and create their own geocaches; the game can be developed when the players invent caches and used more imagination to creations the caches. This doctoral dissertation explores user experience of geocaching and its applications in tourism and education. Globally, based on the Geocaching.com webpage, geocaching has been played about 180 countries and there are more than 10 million registered geocachers worldwide (Geocaching.com, 25.11.2014). This dissertation develops and presents an interaction model called the GameFlow Experience model that can be used to support the design of treasure hunt applications in tourism and education contexts. The GameFlow Model presents and clarifies various experiences; it provides such experiences in a real-life context, offers desirable design targets to be utilized in service design, and offers a perspective to consider when evaluating the success of adventure game concepts. User-centered game designs have adapted to human factor research in mainstream computing science. For many years, the user-centered design approach has been the most important research field in software development. Research has been focusing on user-centered design in software development such as office programs, but the same ideas and theories that will reflect the needs of a user-centered research are now also being applied to game design (Charles et al. 2005.) For several years, we have seen a growing interest in user experience design. Digital games are experience providers, and game developers need tools to better understand the user experience related to products and services they have created. This thesis aims to present what the user experience is in geocaching and treasure hunt games and how it can be used to develop new concepts for the treasure hunt. Engineers, designers, and researchers should have a clear understanding of what user experience is, what its parts are, and most importantly, how we can influence user satisfaction. In addition, we need to understand how users interact with electronic products and people, and how different elements synergize their experiences. This doctoral dissertation represents pioneering work on the user experience of geocaching and treasure hunt games in the context of tourism and education. The research also provides a model for game developers who are planning treasure hunt concepts.Teknologinen kehitys on tarjonnut uusia tapoja hyödyntää viihdettä ja peliteknologiaa ihmisten välisessä vuorovaikutuksessa. Pelit ja niiden pelaaminen on ollut aina tärkeä osa ihmisten arkipäivää. Ihmisen ja tietokoneen välisen vuorovaikutuksen tutkimus, human-computer interaction research (HCI), on perinteisesti nähty kognitiivisena psykologiana, johon kuuluvat inhimilliset tekijät, sekä insinööritieteenä, johon sisältyy tietojenkäsittelytiede. Vaikka kognitiivinen tiede on kehittynyt viime vuosina valtavasti, suunnitteluverkostoihin vaikuttavat ihmisten tunteet ovat yhä tärkeämmässä osassa, erityisesti silloin kun tavoitteena on haastaa ja viihdyttää käyttäjiä. (Norman 2002.) Pelinkehittäjät ovat selvittäneet pelisuunnittelun kannalta olennaisia tekijöitä ja tunnistaneet, että pelien menestyksen salaisuus on käyttäjäkokemus. Käyttäjäkeskeisessä suunnittelussa käyttäjien toiminnan käytäntöjen, tarpeiden ja toiveiden tuntemus tuodaan mukaan suunnitteluprosessiin. Geokätköily on paikannukseen perustuva aarteenetsintäpeli, jonka pelaajat ovat luoneet yhdessä. Pelaajat käyttävät GPS-teknologiaa "aarteiden" etsimiseen ja lisäävät omia geokätkökohteita ja peli kehittyy jatkuvasti pelaajien keksiessä kätköjä, jotka vaativat yhä enemmän mielikuvitusta. Tässäväitöskirjassa tutkitaan geokätköilyn käyttäjäkokemusta ja sen sovelluksia koulutuksen- ja matkailunaloilla. Perustuen Geocaching.com websivustoon geokätköilyä pelataan noin 180 maassa, ja rekisteröityneitä käyttäjiä on yli kymmenen miljoonaa eri puolilla maailmaa (Geocaching.com, 25.11.2014). Tässä tutkielmassa esitellään vuorovaikutusmalli nimeltään GameFlow Experience -mallia, jota voidaan käyttää aarteenetsintäsovellusten suunnittelussa koulutuksen- ja matkailualojen konteksteissa. GameFlow Experience -malli esittelee ja selventää erilaisia kokemuksia - se esittelee ne todellisessa kontekstissa, tarjoaa erilaisia suunnittelutavoitteita palvelusuunnittelua varten sekä näkökulman, joka tulisi ottaa huomioon seikkailupelien menestystä arvioitaessa. Käyttäjäkeskeisessä pelisuunnittelussa on sovellettu inhimillisten tekijöiden tutkimusta valtavirran tietojenkäsittelytieteeseen. Useiden vuosien ajan, käyttäjäkeskeisen suunnittelun lähestymistavasta on tullut tärkein tutkimusala ohjelmistokehityksessä. Tutkimus on keskittynyt ohjelmistojen kehitykseen käyttäjäkeskeisessä suunnittelussa etenkin toimisto-ohjelmistoihin, mutta samoja ideoita ja teorioita, jotka heijastavat yhteiskunnan tarpeita käyttäjäkeskeisessä tutkimuksessa sovelletaan nyt myös pelisuunnitteluun. (Charles ja ym. 2005.) Kiinnostus käyttäjäkokemuksen suunnitteluun on kasvanut jo useiden vuosien ajan. Digitaaliset pelit tarjoavat kokemuksia, ja pelisuunnittelijat tarvitsevatkin työkaluja, joiden avulla voidaan entistä paremmin ymmärtää tuotteiden ja palvelujen luomia käyttäjäkokemuksia. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on esitellä käyttäjäkokemusta ja miten sitä voidaan käyttää uusien aarteenmetsästyskonseptien kehittämiseen. Insinööreillä, suunnittelijoilla ja tutkijoilla tulisi olla selkeä käsitys siitä, mikä käyttäjäkokemus on, mitkä ovat sen osat ja mikä tärkeintä, miten voimme vaikuttaa käyttäjän tyytyväisyyteen. Lisäksi pitäisi ymmärtää, miten käyttäjät toimivat elektronisten tuotteiden kanssa sekä miten ihmiset toimivat vuorovaikutuksessa toistensa kanssa ja miten eri osat vaikuttavat yhdessä käyttäjien kokemuksiin. Väitöskirja on pioneerityö käyttäjäkokemuksesta geokätköilyssä ja aarteenetsintä peleissä matkailun ja opetuksen kontekstissa. Tutkimus antaa myös mallin pelin kehittäjille, jotka suunnittelevat aarteenetsintäkonsepteja.Siirretty Doriast

Rethinking gamification

Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game.The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification

Capturing perceived everyday lived landscapes through gamification and active crowdsourcing

Summary Landscapes are distinguishable areas of the earth with distinct characters comprised of tangible and intangible dimensions and entities. Interactions between humans and landscapes influence social, physical and mental well-being as well as guide behaviour. Understanding how landscapes are perceived has thus gained traction in sustainable and inclusive policy and decision making processes and public participation is called for. The recognised importance of understanding landscapes from an experiential and perceptual perspective and incorporating public participation in data generation efforts is reflected in overarching conventions, policy guidelines and frameworks including the European Landscape Convention (ELC), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), Natures Contributions to People (NCP) and the Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) framework. Major challenges for these conventions and frameworks are 1) how to collect data on landscape experiences and perceptions from a diverse group of individuals, 2) how to integrate and link physical entities, sensory experiences and intangible dimensions of landscapes and 3) how to identify other potential sources of landscape relevant information. The abundance of storage space and the accessibility of broadband internet have led to a burgeoning of user generated natural language content. In parallel, various paradigms of exploiting ubiquitous internet access for research purposes have emerged, including crowdsourcing, citizen science, volunteered geographic information and public participation geographic information systems. These low cost approaches have shown great potential in generating large amounts of data, however, they struggle with motivating and retaining participants. Gamification - broadly defined as adding entertaining or playful elements to applications or processes - has been found to increase user motivation and has explicitly been called for in landscape perception and preference research to diversify participant demographics. Meanwhile, natural language has been found to be deeply intertwined with thought and emotion and has been identified as a rich source of semantic data on how landscapes are perceived and experienced. Written texts and the ways in which these can be analysed have gained particular interest. Therefore, the overall goal of this thesis is to develop and implement a gamified crowdsourcing application to collect natural language landscape descriptions and to analyse and explore the contributions in terms of how landscapes are perceived through sensory experiences and how additional landscape relevant natural language can be identified. To approach this goal, I first elicit key data and feature requirements to collect landscape relevant information from a heterogeneous audience. Guided by the identified requirements, I develop and implement Window Expeditions, a gamified active crowdsourcing platform geared towards collecting natural language descriptions of everyday lived landscapes. The generated corpus of natural language is explored using computational methods and I present and discuss the results in light of who the contributors are, the locations from which participants contribute and salient terms found in English and German. In a further step I annotate a subset of English contributions according to the contained biophysical elements, sensory experiences and cultural ecosystem (dis)services and explore these in terms of how they are linked. Finally, I present a novel approach of using a curated high quality landscape specific dataset to computationally identify similar documents in other corpora using sentence-transformers. Using the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) framework, the aesthetics of discovery, expression and fellowship were identified as most fitting for an active crowdsourcing platform. In addition, four groups of main dynamics were found, namely general dynamics of user interactions, contribution dynamics, exploration dynamics and moderation dynamics. The application was gamified by introducing points and leader boards and the platform was implemented in German and English (with French being added at a later point) to collect landscape descriptions in multiple languages. Demographic information was collected about the users including their year of birth, their gender, if they were at home whilst contributing and what languages users believed to be fluent in. Using the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) framework, the aesthetics of discovery, expression and fellowship were identified as most fitting for an active crowdsourcing platform. In addition, four groups of main dynamics were found, namely general dynamics of user interactions, contribution dynamics, exploration dynamics and moderation dynamics. The application was gamified by introducing points and leader boards and the platform was implemented in German and English (with French being added at a later point) to collect landscape descriptions in multiple languages. Demographic information was collected about the users including their year of birth, their gender, if they were at home whilst contributing and what languages users believed to be fluent in reporting not being at home (n = 172) who were more likely to contribute from areas of herbaceous vegetation. Terms describing salient elements of everyday lived environments such as "tree", "house", "garden" and "street", as well as weather related phenomena and colours were found frequently in both English and German contributions in the generated corpus. Further, terms related to space, time and people were found significantly more frequently in the generated corpus compared to general natural language and representative landscape image descriptions highlighting the importance of spatial features as well as people and the times at which these were observed. Notably, descriptions referring to trees and birds were frequently found in the contributed texts, underlining their saliency in everyday lived landscapes. The results show biophyiscal terms related to vegetation (n = 556) and the built environment (n = 468) as well as weather related terms (n = 452) to be most prominent. Further, contributions referencing visual (n = 186) and auditory (n = 96) sensory experiences were found most often with positive sensory experiences being most common (n = 168) followed by neutral (n = 86) and negative (n = 68). In regards to the intangible dimensions captured in the contributed landscape descriptions, recreation (n = 68) was found most often followed by heritage (n = 36), identity (n = 26) and tranquillity (n = 23). Through linking biophysical elements, sensory experiences and cultural ecosystem (dis)services, the results show that the biophysical category of animals appears often with the sensory experience of smell/taste and the biophysical category of moving objects appears more than expected with the sensory experience of sound. Further, the results show the cultural ecosystem service of inspiration to often appear with the biophysical category of natural features and tranquillity with weather. Using a curated subcorpus of English natural language landscape descriptions (n = 428) collected with Window Expeditions, similar documents in other collections were identified. Through translating documents to vectors by means of sentence-transformers and calculating cosine similarity scores, a total of 6075 to 8172 documents were identified to be similar to contributions to Window Expeditions, depending on if the initial dataset was prefiltered for biophysical noun lemmas (a list of biophysical landscape elements derived from the Window Expeditions corpus) and Craik’s list adjectives (a list of common adjectives used to describe landscapes). Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling, a clustering approach which is commonly used to identify overarching topics or themes in collections of natural language, shows four distinct clusters in both Window Expeditions as well as in the corpus of identified similar documents, namely urban and residential, rural and natural, autumn and colours and snow and weather. Overall, the results presented in this thesis provide further evidence to work that natural language is a rich source of landscape specific information, capturing underlying semantics of a multitude of referenced landscape dimensions. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that computationally aided approaches to analysing and exploring landscape relevant textual data can give detailed insights into salient features of landscapes and how individuals perceive and experience these. Especially when complemented by human annotation, natural language landscape descriptions are a welcome source of data about a landscape’s biophysical elements, individual sensory experiences in landscapes and the perceived cultural ecosystem (dis)services. The findings of this thesis are accompanied by various limitations, chief amongst which are the possibilities of users to falsify their locations, the rather small amount of data that was collected through Window Expeditions and the Eurocentric definitions and approaches common in landscape perception research. The former two limitations can be addressed through implementational reiterations and promotional efforts, whereas the latter limitation calls for further consideration of the socio-culturally induced construction of landscape perception research and a rethinking of holistic approaches, especially in multicultural participatory contexts. The work presented in this thesis shows great potential in complementing landscape perception research with gamified methods of data generation. Active crowdsourcing can be a cost efficient and scalable approach of generating much needed data from a diverse audience. Exploring landscape relevant natural language with both quantitative and qualitative methods from various disciplines including geographic information science, linguistics and machine learning can lead to new insights into landscape perception, sensory landscape experiences and how these are expressed

Rethinking gamification

Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game.The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification

From engagement to life, or: How to do things with gamification?

This essay investigates alternative narratives of the notion of engagement, as it is presented in literature on gamification. It re-evaluates life, creativity and movement, through the work of Henri Bergson, to critique the theories on agency and behaviour that support the development of gamification gadgets. In particular, it looks at the advertisement and functions of the NikeFuel running app, and compares it to artistic experiments that have proposed an alternative mode for being in contact with games and gamification technologies

Rethinking gamification

Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game. The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification

Rethinking Gamification

Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game. The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification