Interweaving mobile games with everyday life

Bell, M. et al. (2006) Interweaving mobile games with everyday life. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada, 22-27 April 2006, pp. 417-426. ISBN 1595933727 (doi: 10.1145/1124772.1124835)

Abstract

We introduce a location--based game called Feeding Yoshi that provides an example of seamful design, in which key characteristics of its underlying technologies-the coverage and security characteristics of WiFi-are exposed as a core element of gameplay. Feeding Yoshi is also a long--term, wide--area game, being played over a week between three different cities during an initial user study. The study, drawing on participant diaries and interviews, supported by observation and analysis of system logs, reveals players' reactions to the game. We see the different ways in which they embedded play into the patterns of their daily lives, augmenting existing practices and creating new ones, and observe the impact of varying location on both the ease and feel of play. We identify potential design extensions to Feeding Yoshi and conclude that seamful design provides a route to creating engaging experiences that are well adapted to their underlying technologies.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: © ACM, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systemshttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124835
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Chalmers, Professor Matthew and Bell, Dr Marek and Sherwood, Dr Scott and Hall, Dr Malcolm
• Authors: Bell, M., Chalmers, M., Barkhuus, L., Hall, M., Sherwood, S., Tennent, P., Brown, B., Rowland, D., Benford, S., Capra, M., and Hampshire, A.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Publisher: ACM Press
• ISBN: 1595933727
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2006 ACM Press
• First Published: First published in proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher including additional information statement.