Iac Iris Soute

Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.

On the design of Camelot, an outdoor game for children

This paper describes the design of Camelot, a mobile outdoor game for small groups of children aged 7-10. Camelot was designed with the aim to encourage social interaction between the players and to encourage physical activity. The paper extends the research literature on design methodology for children, by recording and reflecting upon the lessons learnt by applying a range of techniques for involving children in the design of interactive systems.

Five key challenges in end-user development for tangible and embodied interaction

As tangible and embodied systems are making the transition from the labs to everyday life, there is a growth in the applications related research and design work in this field. We argue that the potential of these technologies can be even further leveraged by enabling domain experts such as teachers, therapists and home owners to act as end-user developers in order to modify and create content for their tangible interactive systems. However, there are important issues that need to be addressed if we want to enable these end users to act as developers. In this paper we identify five key challenges for meta-designers in enabling end-users to develop for tangible and embodied interaction.

Head up games: the games of the future will look more like the games of the past

With the emergence of pervasive technology, pervasive games came into existence. Most are location-aware applications, played with a PDA or mobile phone. We argue that the interaction paradigm these games support, limits outdoor play that often involves spontaneous social interaction. This paper introduces a new genre of pervasive games we call Head Up Games. The paper describes these games and how they differ from current research prototypes of pervasive games. Also, it outlines their characteristics and illustrates our vision with Camelot, an outdoor game for children.

Metadesigning interactive outdoor games for children: a case study.

The growth of tangible and embodied interfaces has lead them to expand from research labs to everyday life. This has raised the question of enduser development and the user requirements for an environment supporting development. This paper researches the user requirements for a toolkit to create interactive outdoor games for children, by adults with no programming skills. We present a case study in which adults designed such games and tested them with children. For the design and testing of the games, RaPIDO, a platform specially designed for prototyping interactive technology, was used. Based on this experience we identify requirements for a toolkit to support the creation of interactive outdoor games.

An OWL in the classroom: development of an interactive storytelling application for preschoolers

In research there is a considerable interest in developing interactive educational systems. However, the typical classroom remains a rather lowtech environment. Allowing teachers to create, adapt and share interactive learning applications might increase the uptake of technology in the classroom. In this paper a study is presented that explores the deployment of a robotstorytelling application for preschoolers, while simultaneously investigating the teachers requirements for a toolkit to create stories for the robot. The results suggest that a robotstorytelling application can be a valuable addition to the classroom and that indeed a toolkit for creating stories would increase its usefulness in the curriculum.

Rule customization in head-up games

This research examines the feasibility of rule customization for a genre of pervasive games for children called Head-Up Games [11], which are intended to be played outdoors by children and to encourage physical activity and social interaction. An interface to allow customization of game rules was created. An evaluation involving 22 children aged 11--13, showed that children are able to customize the game and this can be an effective means of keeping them engaged with such games for longer periods.

TAPT and contextmapping: understanding how we understand experience

Teasing Apart, Piecing Together (TAPT) and Contextmapping (CM) are cross-disciplinary methods for understanding peoples experiences, in order to build better products and services. Whereas TAPT concerns deconstructing and reconstructing experiences, CM is a method for accessing laypeoples tacit knowledge to support design. This article describes these methods, which have been used in domains including the humanities, software engineering, and industrial design. It describes a small comparative evaluation that explores the types of insight yielded by each method, and the contexts of use in which each method is suitable. Eight students worked in pairs on two design tasks, producing designs, responding to questionnaires, and participating in a group discussion. The design tasks were built to further the research of the second author, who assessed the designs in this context. Initial results showed that both methods were suitable for use, but that TAPT was better at dealing with emotional and social aspects of experience, and was faster and easier to use: TAPT was arguably better suited to the tasks. This study demonstrates a suitable approach for comparing design methods, and lets us identify the more important research questions about the use of TAPT and CM. The designs that our participants produced can be used in a future study to garner more insights, particularly about how informative and inspirational method outputs are. The strongest factors when deciding which method to use appear to be whether there is a desired focus on emotional and social facets, and the time available to apply the method.

Evaluating player experience for children's outdoor pervasive games

There is a growing body of research in pervasive outdoor gaming, mainly focused on adult players playing games on smart phones. Published evaluations of the player experience in such games are largely based on anecdotal descriptions and post-play surveys. The latter approach is especially challenging to apply when the play test participants are children. Observations of game play so far have been ad hoc relying on unstructured observation, which makes it difficult to extract reliable conclusions from observations and to draw comparisons between different games. In this paper we present two methods developed specifically for evaluating the player experience in children’s outdoor games: the Outdoor Play Observation Scheme (OPOS) and GroupSorter. We discuss their application in three different case studies and conclude that OPOS is useful in quantifying the different types of play behavior in outdoor games; GroupSorter adds qualitative data on the play experience. Moreover, the application of GroupSorter is not limited to game development but can be used for obtaining user input in other context as well.

Designing Interactive Outdoor Games for Children

Mobile outdoor games for groups of children have emerged recently as a credible technological proposition and as an area of research and development that promises substantial benefits for children regarding a more active lifestyle and the development of social skills. This chapter examines specifically the design of Head Up Games, which are outdoor games that support embodied interaction and where players are collocated, e.g., in a playground, alley, park; the traditional loci of children’s play over centuries. Designing such games and the emerging gaming experience presents its own set of challenges, such as designing the interaction of a group, ensuring pace in the game, and fairness for different contexts and groups of players. Not least, the added value of enhancing outdoor play and games with technology needs to be ensured. We describe some of the lessons learned from the design of a few of these games, how different design methods may contribute to the design process, and methodological issues concerning the early design, the prototyping, and the evaluation of these games.