Markus Montola

Applying game achievement systems to enhance user experience in a photo sharing service

Achievement systems are reward structures providing additional goals for players, and thus extending the play time of videogames. In this paper, we explore how applications other than games could benefit from achievement systems, and how users perceive this additional content in a service. For this purpose, we added an achievement system to a geo-tagged photo sharing service called Nokia Image Space. The results suggest that there is some potential in achievement systems outside the game domain. The achievements triggered some friendly competition and comparison between users. However, many users were not convinced, expressing concerns about the achievements motivating undesirable usage patterns. Therefore, an achievement system poses certain design considerations when applied in nongame software.

Prosopopeia: experiences from a pervasive Larp

Live action role playing, Larp, is a play genre that so far has received little attention from the game studies community. However, the Live action role playing community is perhaps the most interesting role play community of all in its intense focus on role-taking, improvisation, and immersion. Furthermore, Larping has been extensively used for serious purposes, both for crisis training and psychological treatment.In this paper, we focus on Pervasive Larp, Larp events that are staged in the real world and where both the people and the objects of the real world have a direct role in the game. This is a relatively novel variant of Larping, which poses higher demands on technology support than traditional Larps. We report on the experiences from designing and staging Prosopopeia, a pervasive Larp event based on an alternate reality aesthetics. In this game, every design choice was informed by the wish to keep the game as close to reality as possible. We conclude that the approach is indeed both possible and promising, and identify some suggestions for improvements.

Pervasive games in ludic society

In this paper we chart how pervasive games emerge from the intersection of two long-standing cultural trends, the increasing blurring of fact and fiction in media culture, and the movements struggling over public space. During the past few decades a third trend has given a new meaning to media fabrication and street cultures: the rise of ludus in the society through maturation of the gamer generations. As more and more activities are perceived as games in the contemporary society, fabricated media expression and performative sports pave the way for a new way of gaming. Born in the junction of playful, ordinary and fabricated, pervasive games toy with conventions and configurations of contemporary media.

Studying the Elusive Experience in Pervasive Games

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult and different from studying computer or board games. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying several playful pervasive technology prototypes. It discusses the challenges and pitfalls of evaluating pervasive game prototypes and charts methods that have proven useful in previous research. The aim is to open discussion on the situated methodology of qualitative study of evaluating and researching pervasive play.

Social Constructionism and Ludology: Implications for the Study of Games

This article combines the paradigm of social constructionism with the developing field of ludology. As games are intersubjective meaning-making activities, their study requires understanding of the nature of social constructions, and how such constructions are produced and interpreted: The formalist nature of ludological core concepts such as game world and game rules is often taken for granted, even though such structures exist only as social constructions. The article also considers the implications of the constructionist approach on the research of games: Such a perspective is especially important for the study of nonrepeatable, irreversible, distributed, and emergent forms of play.