Kari Kraus

Designing reusable alternate reality games

Successful Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), such as The Lost Experience, I Love Bees and Urgent EVOKE have solicited thousands of active participants and, often, millions of spectators from around the world. ARGs require significant resources not only in terms of initial design, but also in implementation, since live, dynamic interplay between players and designers is an inherent aspect of their interactive storylines. This paper outlines a novel design framework for creating reusable ARGs that will help extend the lifespan of ARGs and allow them to permeate new domains such as education. The framework includes three key reusable design objectives (replayability, adaptability, extensibility), each of which can be enacted at different levels of depth. We also identify barriers to reusable ARGs and design strategies for overcoming those barriers, drawing upon ARG designer interviews and existing ARGs.

Pervasive Play

The infusion of mobile and collaborative technologies into our everyday lives enables new forms of pervasive games and play. We use the term pervasive play as shorthand for technology-mediated, playful experiences that are tethered to our everyday lives through the physical and virtual spaces we inhabit. This includes a variety of game and play genres ranging from alternate reality games to urban games to mixed reality performance and playful uses of public displays. The goals of the workshop are to (a) strengthen and broaden the community of pervasive play researchers and practitioners, (b) explore design frameworks for creating novel pervasive play experiences, and (c) identify key research questions, methods, and challenges for future research in this area.

It's About Time: Projecting Temporal Metadata for Historically Significant Recordings

Twentieth century audio recordings and motion pictures are important sources, both for scholarly analysis and for public history. In some cases, important metadata has not reached the collecting institutions along with the materials, which are now in need of richer description. This paper describes a novel technique for determining the date and time on which a recording was made based on analysis of incidentally captured traces of small variations in the electric power supply at the time the recording was made.