If you’re not a gamer (one who plays computer-based games), and maybe even if you are; you may not be aware of a relatively new ‘field of study’ called pervasive gaming. Don’t go off on the wrong track with “all-pervasive” gaming; this is localized. Pervasive gaming is heralded as an ‘emerging genre.’ (How’s that for literizing an activity?) The pervasive game emphasizes a person’s actual physical location. It extends the gaming experience into the physical world. A pervasive game uses networked computer devices (such as phones, a Wii-like controller, or something similar) to coordinate the activity of those playing the game. Here’s a quick example, It’s called ‘Hot Potato’….

The game starts with one player’s mobile device beginning a count-down, a virtual timer. That device has, at that moment, the ‘hot potato’. During the game, the hot potato (timer) counts down to zero, at which point it ‘explodes’. When this happens, the person holding it is out of the game. The game repeats count-downs until only one player is left. The key action is that players can ‘throw’ the hot potato to another player by coming close to them and making a throwing action with their arm, while holding their device. Of course, other players will try to move away from the person with the potato, but moving too far from other players increases the chances that a new hot potato will be generated on your device. This keeps the players together, more or less, while they still try to avoid coming close to the one(s) with an active hot potato.

Hot Potato is a pervasive game devised by Ioannis Chatzigiannakis and other researchers at the University of Patras in Greece. They used a Sun Spot sensor network to implement the game, which can handle up to fourteen players. By all accounts, the game is fun and physically demanding. So, in the growing tradition of computer augmented exercise (and now physical games), you can add the gaming environment of pervasive games. There are, at this very short moment only about five or six years since an identifiable pervasive gaming began, a little over a hundred pervasive games (see http://pervasivegaming/ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-games-list), which is to say the genre is just in its infancy. In fact, most of the games are the work of academic types who are getting paid for their off-the-wall noodling.

However, working in this environment is technically demanding. It’s not hard to understand that actual movement on the part of players – often fast movement at that – is not easy to track with sensors, receivers, and computers. There’s a lot of spatial data, which then has to be analyzed for meaning in the context of the game. The hardware for pervasive gaming, including both networking and computing, needs to be powerful. Writing software for pervasive games is, as the expression goes, ‘a whole ‘nother game.’

Pervasive games are not limited to situations where the players are together (in close proximity). There are variations that use GPS and other localization techniques to position players. It’s the ‘open-spacedness’ of pervasive gaming that may eventually lead to dropping that moniker in favor of ‘mobile gaming,’ which doesn’t capture the complexity but is more likely to be remembered.

In a sense, for pervasive games the whole world is the game board. One of the most interesting aspects of some pervasive games is the deliberate blurring of the line between fiction and reality. Websites, blogs, social network sites can be used to create the game’s narratives (even back story), and provide key game information – most of which is fictional. The game itself, however, takes place in real locations, in real time, in (more or less) real situations. That’s perhaps why there’s already a sub-genre – adventure pervasive games. One of the first of these was Uncle Roy is All Around You, the 2003 creation of Microsoft Research (yes, the big-uns like Sony, Microsoft, EA are deep into various aspects of pervasive games). In the Uncle Roy game, players could be either on-line or in the streets – trying to locate the mythical Uncle Roy. Most of the narrative created online was fictional, but it tied out to real clues in real locations. The online players were allowed to either collaborate or interfere with the street players, who were tracked on a 3D city map.

Most of the above is ancient history for the pervasive game creators. Both the technology and the creativity unleashed in this type of gaming has a way of taking off in surprising directions, one might say ludic directions (ludic, meaning of or relating to playfulness or play). Some say that pervasive gaming needs to find its ‘killer app’ – the quintessential game that goes viral worldwide. Perhaps. It could also be like Artificial Intelligence, which so far hasn’t produced any competition even for minimal human brains, but has scattered its research and results into hundreds of things big and small. If Uncle Roy can be all around you, but not seen; so can pervasive gaming.

For some references:
IPerG
Pervasive Games Blog
Pervasive Gaming
Ercim