Designing for the dichotomy of immersion in location based games

The interaction design of mixed reality location based games typically focuses upon the digital content of the mobile screen, as this is characteristically the primary navigational tool players use to traverse the game space. This emphasis on the digital over the physical means the opportunity for player immersion in mixed reality games is often limited to the single (digital) dimension. This research seeks to redress this imbalance, which is caused, in part, by the requirement for the player?s attention to be systematically switched between the two worlds, defined in this research as the ?Dichotomy of Immersion?. Using different design strategies we propose minimising the reliance of the player upon the mobile screen by encouraging greater observation of their physical surroundings. Using a ?research through design? approach for the mixed reality game PAC-LAN: Zombie Apocalypse, we illustrate design strategies for increasing immersion in location based games, which we believe will aid designers in enabling players to more readily engage with the physical context of the game and thus facilitate richer game experiences

Mapping the beach beneath the street:digital cartography for the playable city

Maps are an important component within many of the playful and gameful experiences designed to turn cities into a playable infrastructures. They take advantage of the fact that the technology used for obtaining accurate spatial information, such as GPS receivers and magnetometers (digital compasses), are now so wide-spread that they are considered as ‘standard’ sensors on mobile phones, which are themselves ubiquitous. Interactive digital maps, therefore, are are widely used by the general public for a variety of purposes. However, despite the rich design history of cartography digital maps typically exhibit a dominant aesthetic that has been de-signed to serve the usability and utility requirements of turn-by-turn urban navigation, which is itself driven by the proliferation of in-car and personal navigation services. The navigation aesthetic is now widespread across almost all spatial applications, even where a be-spoke cartographic product would be better suited. In this chapter we seek to challenge this by exploring novel neo-cartographic ap-proaches to making maps for use within playful and gameful experi-ences designed for the cities. We will examine the potential of de-sign approaches that can producte not only more aesthetically pleasing maps, but also offer the potential for influencing user be-haviour, which can be used to promote emotional engagement and exploration in playable city experiences

Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games: Navigation and Narrative in Game Design and Play Experiences

This thesis examines how people engage with place through location-based games. Location-based games are those that incorporate the player’s physical location and/or actions into the gameplay through media interfaces. Despite growing in popularity over the past two decades, there is an absence of fine-grained ethnographic research into everyday practices and emplaced experiences of location-based game design and play. The contributions of this thesis are built upon three years of practice-based, autoethnographic participation in developing location-based games, alongside ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups with creative collaborators and players. Its findings unpack how engagement with place unfolds through the design and play of location-based games and the implications of these processes for how we understand place as a concept today. In doing so, it builds upon scholarship concerning locative and mobile media, interfaces, play, digital narratives, games and philosophies of place.These insights are presented through a thematic focus on three sets of considerations about place negotiated during the development and play of location-based games: the multiplicity of elements that gather in places; the contingent, everyday interactions that occur in places; and the impressions of place people perceive. Analysing how these considerations are negotiated, this thesis identifies how engagement with place through location-based games is underpinned by interrelationships between navigation and narrative. Understood as uneven, performative and intersubjective relations, they shape the accessibility and legibility of the diverse elements that gather in places; players’ attention toward the processes through which these elements interact in everyday contexts; and the co-production of complex, dynamic and extroverted impressions of place by players. At a time when ‘place’ as a concept has been unsettled by large-scale processes of globalisation and digitisation, these empirical and theoretical contributions create new openings for understanding how digital, locative, mobile and playful media are implicated in everyday experiences of being-in-the-world

How Chinese SMEs innovate with a ‘diegetic innovation templating’? - the stimulating role of Sci-fi and fantasy

Use of established fiction provides a connection to society at large, tapping into the creative abilities of great authors and filmmakers, which can offer a valuable source of creative ideas. This paper explores how science fiction and fantasy, particularly in the form of films, is being used to stimulate creativity and produce innovation outputs in non-science SMEs in China. We argue that fiction has the potential to inspire innovation through a constructive organisational process, we provide a simple metric, the ‘Diegetic Gap’, as a means for illustrating this. In particular, we present four empirical case studies that explore the application of science fiction and fantasy to product and process innovation, utilising a concept we call a Diegetic Innovation Template to merge fictional narrative and tangible innovation output

Black Mobility Matters: An Exploratory Study of Uber, Hacking, and the Commons in Baltimore

Questions about the city – its boundaries, fabric, size, scale, culture, economy, historical and political contributions – populate the expansive horizon of architectural theory. Its immediate denotation is elusive, but the city is frequently captured within images of living networks: complex organisms, ecosystems, hives, colonies, bundles of neurons. These images of “city as living being,” present it as possessing essential organs connected by an indispensable circulatory system, regulated by a metabolism. Thus, the vitality and relative scale of a city can be measured from its transportation infrastructure and flow of capital. Many large-sized US cities survived the devastating effects of deindustrialization and white flight, maintaining adequate circulatory systems that connected urban residents to means of work. For the majority of medium-sized US cities – Baltimore, Cincinnati, Buffalo and Pittsburg to name a few – this was not the case. These cities suffered large declines in employment, population, and infrastructure maintenance, as they transitioned from an industrial to a tourist and service (FIRE) based economy. While mobile network technologies supplement existing transit systems in large-sized US cities, they exploit the hollowing out of medium-sized cities in the US post-industrial landscape. These technologies are attempting to both define urban labor and imagine how people connect to labor. In so doing they (re)imagine and (re)define the city itself, (re)organizing the way essential organs are connected and regulated. This article examines the economic and social practices of Uber and how it shapes, and is shaped by, the commons of medium-sized cities that revolutionizes traditional notions of urban work and mobility, but not necessarily for the better in the long run. Later, the article explores how this imagining impacts the commons through differentiating Uber from Hacking, a long-standing though illegal solution to urban immobility in Baltimore. Through their comparison, the article proposes a civic-minded, open-sourced on-demand car service that capitalizes on Baltimore’s car centricity and strengthens the commons through cooperative and mobile networks

Cartography, location-based gaming and the legibility of mixed reality spaces

This paper presents a number of cartographic design solutions to the creation of a web-map for the mixed-reality location-based game ‘Pac-Lan: Zombie Apocalypse’. The research-purpose of this game is to explore ways to encourage players to become more fully engaged with the physical location in which the game is played, by designing the game interface in such a way as to discourage players from becoming reliant solely upon the device screen for navigation. By increasing the level of player interaction with their surroundings, it is intended that a more immersive game experience within mixed reality space may be created. The map is a crucial on-screen element in any location based game, and four maps are presented here as potential solutions for ‘Pac-Lan: Zombie Apocalypse’, each of which approach the design goals of the game in a different manner