Anton Gustafsson

Evaluation of a pervasive game for domestic energy engagement among teenagers

In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phone-based game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the games evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues.

Promoting new patterns in household energy consumption with pervasive learning games

Engaging computer games can be used to change energy consumption patterns in the home. PowerAgent is a pervasive game for Java-enabled mobile phones that is designed to influence everyday activities and use of electricity in the domestic setting. PowerAgent is connected to the households automatic electricity meter reading equipment via the cell network, and this setup makes it possible to use actual consumption data in the game. In this paper, we present a two-level model for cognitive and behavior learning, and we discuss the properties of PowerAgent in relation to the underlying situated learning, social learning, and persuasive technology components that we have included in the game.

Believable environments: generating interactive storytelling in vast location-based pervasive games

Generating content into vast areas is a relevant challenge in the field of location-based pervasive games. In this paper, we present a game prototype that enables children travelling in the back seat of a car to enjoy a narrated experience where gameplay combines with the experience of traveling through the road network. The prototype is designed to provide what we refer to as a believable environment. We propose four design characteristics to persuasively include a journey within a pervasive game. First, the story should refer to geographical objects with their everyday meanings. Second, the games scale needs to cover vast areas. Third, the application should provide sequential storytelling to make it fit with the journey experience, and finally it should provide interaction support where players can engage in gameplay and interact with the computer in various ways at the same time as they are looking out of the car window. We describe how these requirements have been implemented in the prototype and present an initial performance test.

Visualizing energy consumption of radiators

Heating is a significant expenditure of many households today but the actual power consumption of the heating devices are seldom recognized. To help people understand and reflect upon their domestic energy consumption, we have designed an electrical radiator that emits heat entirely from light bulbs. This appliance responds to temperature changes in the room via sensors. The idea was to combine the product semantics of lamps and radiators and direct focus on the latter neglected product category. We argue that by redesigning domestic appliances adding means to visualize energy consumption in engaging and interesting ways it is possible to make energy utilization less abstract and easier to comprehend.

Games for passengers: accounting for motion in location-based applications

Passengers pay attention to the landscape as they move through the environment. We suggest a new type of applications, which adds to that experience. It consider their motion and velocity, which make the time available for interaction with individual geographical objects very limited, at the same time as they cannot control it. Applications, in this case a game, could utilize audio and gesture interfaces, as well as digital maps to provide for experiences that are sequentially mapped onto the landscape. An initial user feed back trial made visible interactional and experiential challenges in passengering.