Hierarchies of Pervasive Games by Storyboarding

Transcription

1 Hierarchies of Pervasive Games by Storyboarding Oksana Arnold Erfurt Univ. of Applied Sciences Applied Computer Science Altonaer Straße Erfurt, Germany Klaus P. Jantke Fraunhofer Inst. Digital Media Technology Children s Media Department Erich-Kästner-Straße 1a Erfurt, Germany klaus.jantke@idmt.fraunhofer.de Sebastian Spundflasch Ilmenau University of Technology Institute of Media Technology P.O.Box Ilmenau, Germany sebastian.spundflasch@tu-ilmenau.de Abstract Pervasive games form a problematic digital games category. On the one hand, they appear extremely promising for purposes such as learning and for encouraging players to engage in healthy outdoor activities. They widen the horizon of game contents by direct access to reality. On the other hand, a larger number of pervasive games failed badly bearing abundant evidence for the need of better understanding the essentials of pervasive games and of the experiences in playing pervasively. Hierarchies of pervasive games reveal strengths and weaknesses of those games and allow for partially ordering pervasive games. Storyboarding is an appropriate technology for the representation of several essentials characterizing experiences of game play. ALIENS ON THE BUS is some novel pervasive game to illuminate the reach of the storyboarding approach to games classification. Indeed, it is worth to look for a digital game s part which remains in the digital world (on the computer) in contrast to another part which managed to enter reality. In case the two are still constituting a single game, the communication between the virtual game world and the real game world deserves some particular interest. Lindley simply says that for a pervasive game, the physical world has a greater impact upon game experience than in the case of conventional computer or console games [27]. Seen from this point of view, a pervasive game is a digital game characterized (i) by some virtual game world, (ii) by some real world activities, and (iii) by communication between these two game components. In particular, (iv) the game may establish meaning of real world components, events, and activities in the virtual game world. I. INTRODUCTION The conference s title has made the authors pondering what might deserve to be called a games innovation. Although they did not yet arrive at any conclusion, the authors decided to adopt the viewpoint that a games innovation should be something that results in novel game play experiences. Novel game play experiences mean novel effects of game playing and novel ways of reaching those formerly unknown experiences and effects. Novel perspectives at game playing are likely to contribute to the development of innovative games aiming at novel experiences and effects. The focus of the present contribution is on the latter case. The application domain of the authors contribution is pervasive games [38]. In earlier days, the term pervasive game was seen in close relation to live-action role-playing (LARP) as Schneider and Kortuem put it: We define a Pervasive Game as a LARP game that is augmented with computing and communication technology in a way that combines the physical and digital space together [43]. Lateron, the term got separated from role-playing and has been used with a variety of different meanings in mind [40]. A slightly more recent introductory and umbrella paper tries to characterize a pervasive game [32] as a game that has one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally or socially, a perspective which has been elaborated in much detail in the IPerG project [34]. When dealing with particular more or less pervasive games, it is not easy to make those features explicit. There is a hint hiding in the title of Bullerdiek s book [9] saying that some games exit the computer. Fig. 1. Very high level storyboard of the TREASURE game s mechanics As an introductory illustration, the figure 1 is intended to explicate in the pervasive game TREASURE [10] the interplay of the real and the virtual; more details are discussed in [24].

2 Pervasive games are frequently understood as digital games blurring the borderline between the virtual game world and the real world of the human players life. Speaking and writing about anything of interest beyond the conventional limits of game play necessarily requires to have an idea of those limits. It turns out that several attempts to determine game play, such as in [18], e.g., are surely of historical and cultural interest and may be used for numerous social science investigations, but are far too uncertain to base upon detailed discussions of phenomena of trespassing the limits. Fig. 2. The authors schematic explanation of digital game playing The authors approach to game play has been adopted and adapted 1 from Jürgen Fritz book [16] and introduced in [19]. It has been investigated in detail elsewhere (see [20], p. 8). For the purpose of the present investigation, framing as a conscious human activity of drawing a borderline between game play and real life is of primary interest. Inside the drawn limits, game play mainly means the experience of balancing self-determination against indetermination. This usually includes a gain of increasing control 2 of the game mechanics, a process which may be seen as self-determined exploratory learning; all this taking place within the limits set up by framing. The balance symbolized in figure 2 above and, in particular, the efforts of maintaining this balance establish the exciting experience of playing. Designing a digital game means the anticipation of this experience and the specification of the details to make such an experience likely to occur in the magic circle [18], [42]. When particular digital games such as those belonging to a category named pervasive games are expanding the game world spatially [37], framing has to be revisited. The synergy of the virtual world and the real world establishes new meanings (see [37], fig. 4.3, p. 87). A new world of imagination is established (in which a road may be seen as river, e.g.) in which the human experience takes place [3]. It is surely a particular challenge to maintain flow experience [12] when stumbling around in reality. The present contribution is neither about the narrative and/or ludological underpinnings nor about the psychological background of experience, but about certain formal methods of anticipation, specification, and implementation storyboarding. 1 The authors do not agree with Jürgen Fritz frequently published overemphasis of risk. But the related discussion exceeds the limits of the present contribution and is, therefore, suppressed here. 2 This model has numerous implications such as, e.g., an understanding of the difficulty to allow for a pleasant replay. II. UNDERSTANDING PERVASIVE GAMES For understanding pervasive games, the book [38] and the chapters and so-called cases therein are definitely a standard reference. The present section relies of the prior work of [38] and on slightly varying perspectives like, e.g., in [7] and [31]. The focus of this section is narrowly on the way from digital games peculiarities to storyboarding digital games. Those who are not personally engaged in designing, developing, or actively playing pervasive games are frequently confused about the state of affair. As a naïve user, one expects pervasive games to be particularly useful for purposes such as learning, training and knowledge dissemination, because game playing, to a large extent, happens in the real world. There seems to be enormous potential of dealing with the real subjects of learning, training, and understanding. But the reality of pervasive gaming is surprising the spectators. There are games such as REXPLORER [2] proudly praised as the first permanent high-tech city game of the world [8]. The game had been released in May and vanished in August of the same year permanence lasted for three months. Other games such as EPIDEMIC MENACE [45], according to the game authors [28], made it to be practiced only two times at all. And the pervasive game VEM GR ÅTER [39], apparently, has been played only once. All those are no stories of success. Other games such as INVISIBLE BUILDINGS [51], [52] are unlikely to become widespread, because they require enormous personnel expenses. This applies, to some extent, to a large class of pervasive games including those of some role playing character [33], of which MOMENTUM [46] and PACMANHAT- TAN [26] are good examples, and other games which rely on expensive set-ups like, e.g., THE BEAST [36], SHELBY LOGAN S RUN [4], EPIDEMIC MENACE [28] [45], UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU [1], and THE AMAZING RACE [35]. Surely a particular game case based on extremely expensive investments was MYSTERY ON FIFTH AVENUE [11]. From a scientific point of view, it is rather unsatisfactory to treat all those problematic cases of pervasive games just by means of episodic reports. In the face of the attractiveness of pervasive games, on the one hand, and the surprising stories of pervasive games that failed badly, on the other hand, there shows an apparent need of better understanding the characteristics of those games. This will allow for comparison and classification of those games. The state of affair bears abundant evidence for the need of, so to speak, intellectual tools that allow for a sufficiently clear description of pervasive games. Particular requirements are (i) to reflect the particularly interwoven structure of a game s real and virtual world and (ii) to allow for deriving insights into the human game play experiences that are likely to emerge. The present paper provides the authors contribution of using storyboarding for systematization of pervasive games. Whether or not this may be considered a games innovation is left to the reviewers and, perhaps, later on to the readers. Storyboarding is not assumed to substitute approaches like those based on gameplay design patterns [6] à la [5]. Instead, it should be seen as a complimentary perspective which may lead to novel insights and designs as illustrated in section V.

3 III. ESSENTIALS OF STORYBOARDING Storyboarding is a technology for anticipating forthcoming human experience [23]. It turns out to be particularly suitable for pondering the didactic potentials of digital games, in general, and of pervasive games, in particular [24]. The variety of educational applications is large [25] including the explication of pedagogical patterns [21]. This section is intended to present storyboarding à la [23] in a nutshell (due to the limited space). Illustrations are scattered throughout all the other sections. A storyboard is a finite hierarchically structured family of finite directed graphs. The nodes of the graphs are either called scenes or episodes. Both nodes and edges may be labeled. These few statement summarize the essentials. For the authors approach, it is important that storyboards are digital. Consequently, the storyboards may be loaded or compiled into game systems. Even more flexibly, games may be programmed to be able to interpret storyboards, that is to run on the storyboard at playing time and to act accordingly. (This, however, exceeds the limits of the present contribution.) When some node is named a scene, it is considered atomic and has some meaning in the domain. Such a node may be some file like, e.g., an audio file or a video, to be presented or some player activity to be executed. When some node is named an episode, it is understood to be compound and may be replaced by some graph(s) of the given family. This allows for repeatedly using the same design ideas in different places. Substitutions allow also for recursion. Edges lead from one episode or scene to another episode or scene. In case there is more than one edge outgoing from some node, this might either mean some parallelism or some available choices. Labeling of edges is used for resolving conflicts. For illustration, have a look at figure 3 on the right. Players walking in the city may have four alternative choices in the game: (i) to continue walking, (ii) to exchange insects with others, (iii) to refresh insects they have already, and (iv) to find some Bluetooth device for possibly acquiring some new virtual insect. When some Bluetooth device is found, the two outgoing edges describe parallel game actions of game playing. (i) Some virtual insect is generated from the Bluetooth ID and (ii) the pickup episode is entered in which the player may acquire the newly generated insect. All but one node on display in figure 3 are episodes. They need to be specified by subgraphs going into some more detail. For the Walk in the City node there is hardly any need for a specification. Storyboards of this type allow for a mixed design strategy dovetailing top-down and bottom-up design. Because the design process of a real pervasive game is usually complex and time consuming, one really arrives at a collection of graphs. On the one hand, it is usually not difficult to develop some top level description of the overall game structure. On the other hand, game development is usually driven by several innovative low level ideas for which smaller graphs are designed. Those characteristic novel ideas are in many cases frequently used throughout game playing. The corresponding graphs are later on substituted in different places. Ultimately, expanding the hierarchically structured graph results in some large graph consisting of nodes that are scenes, exclusively. IV. STORYBOARDING FOR ANALYZING GAMES As briefly sketched in the preceding section, storyboarding is a design technology aiming at the anticipation of human experience. According to the present authors perspective at pervasive games (see first page of this paper, second column) there will be three components identifiable in a pervasive game s storyboard: real world activities, virtual world actions, inter-world communications. Rather high level storyboards serve well for characterizing pervasive games. The following figure 3 exemplifies some Fig. 3. Very high level storyboard of the INSECTOPIA game s mechanics storyboard for the game INSECTOPIA [41]. This storyboard is discussed in some detail in [24]. Here, a few words will do. Four of the large boxes are episodes of human real world activities. The smaller boxes in the middle describe the virtual world actions of generating virtual insects and of bookkeeping. Readers may easily recognize a very strong similarity to the storyboard of TREASURE [10] on display in figure 1 above. When seen from this particular point of abstraction, these two pervasive games appear almost identical. In TREASURE you collect virtual treasures, whereas in INSECTOPIA you collect virtual insects. There is some substantial difference in communication. TREASURE depends on three different wireless communication protocols, whereas INSECTOPIA needs the Bluetooth protocol exclusively. By the way, the three different protocols are essential to TREASURE, because this game is intended to teach players about seamful communication. To sum up intermediately, the exemplified storyboarding approach allows for categorization of pervasive games, first, by revealing structural similarities and, second, by making substantial differences explicit.

4 One of the interesting differences between TREASURE and INSECTOPIA is that the latter one does not need any players position bookkeeping. In this respect, the pervasive game named BOTFIGHTERS [44] is very similar to TREASURE and the two are more complex than INSECTOPIA. The essence becomes visible in their storyboards. This is just an example illustrating how storyboarding may help to compare pervasive games with respect to selected criteria and, thus, to establish partially ordered hierarchies of pervasive games. The present section will be completed by listing a few characteristics of pervasive games which can be easily found in their storyboards. In some sense, every list item may be seen as some dimension according to which pervasive games may be systematized. The dimensions span a high dimensional space in which each game is characterized by some location. A. Digital Game World Activities Many of the contemporary pervasive games do mostly bookkeeping in their digital components. Fundamental variants are (ordered according to increasing complexity): bookkeeping of resources only, bookkeeping of player positions only, bookkeeping of positions and resources. Those operations of the digital game world can be widely computerized. Taking this into consideration, one arrives at another crucial distinction: The digital game world is fully automated. The digital game world requires human intervention. The latter case is apparently highly expensive and several games failed due to this game feature. What is currently mostly missing is a digital game world having an autonomous life of its own meaningful to the player. B. Real Game World Activities There is an enormous variety of potential activities in the real world and it seems an unreasonable attempt to systematize all of them. However, what exists in contemporary pervasive games is usually rather simple in structure. Players move around in the real world and interact from time to time with the digital world according to their real world position with respect to virtual objects and/or events. Players move around in the real world and interact from time to time with the digital world according to their real world position with respect to real world objects and/or events. Players move around in the real world and interact from time to time with other players in dependence on their real world status. Players move around in the real world and interact from time to time with other players in dependence on their real world status and/or some virtual status attributes. What is currently mostly missing is some substantial impact of the digital game world s possibly complex state. C. Inter-World Communication The communications between the real and the virtual game world vary, on the one hand, by the protocols involved and, on the other hand, by the established meaning in the real world. It is highly desirable to go beyond bookkeeping and receiving virtual objects by, e.g., exerting influence on the digital world. For the sake of systematization, one needs to clarify what information is exchanged between the real and the virtual world. Player positions are transferred to the virtual world. Object positions are transferred to the virtual world. Information about virtual objects (such as treasures, e.g.) is transferred from the virtual to the real world. Information about player actions (taking some object, e.g.) is transferred from the real to the virtual world. Players contact each other via reality-virtuality-reality channels. By means of inter-world communication, processes of the virtual world may establish meaning in the real world such as meaning to locations, meaning to objects, meaning to humans, meaning to human behavior. The latter case might need some illustrative explanation. Imagine some player in a pervasive role-playing game to reach some location in reality. The game system may declare this to be some mysterious place in the game world where some real object the player is carrying becomes a magic wand. The human player virtually becoming a magician may perform some act having a meaning exclusively in the virtual game world such as raising some dead to life. Apparently, different steps of the game system listed above to be perceived be the human players appropriately require largely varying degrees of imagination. Bateman points to the problem that the need for too much imagination may cause a game to fail (see [3], p. 57). There are rather extreme examples such as the games EDUVENTURE I [14] and EDUVENTURE II [50]. The design of the game(s) described in some detail on their Web page gamedesign.php is, frankly speaking, cumbersome. Consequently, it does not surprise very much that there are no reports about playing the game(s) according to the story concepts announced. D. Dimensions Beyond the Expressiveness of Storyboarding To be honest, storyboarding is not the all-in-one device suitable for every purpose, because some important aspects of the resulting game playing experience are not visible in the storyboard of a game. They are grounded in details of the storyboard s implementation and may unfold during human game playing. However, there are borderline cases such as the role of human imagination (see section IV-C above). There is no way to foresee in a storyboard whether or not a human being may face difficulties in suspending her disbelief.

5 V. STORYBOARDING &GAME DESIGN EXEMPLIFIED From the insights derived above, the authors are going to draw conclusions to demonstrate the reach and effectiveness of the present storyboarding approach. As a result, they are going to present their pervasive game ALIENS ON THE BUS. A. Aliens on the Bus from a Bird s Eye View Literally, seen from a bird s eye view you hardly recognize any aliens on the bus, because the aliens are inside. The headline of this subsection is, as usual, more metaphorical aiming at a general picture of the game idea, first. Scientific arguments underlying the game design follow within the other subsections of section V below. When some transportation network has been selected (you do not need all subway lines of Tokyo and you may easily drop the monorail to Haneda, for instance), the next step is to determine some virtual schedule for the virtual buses running on the network. It is important to specify at what time points virtual buses arrive virtually at real bus stops. The virtual world of buses is persistent. The virtual buses are even going virtually, if human players do not really interact. In the basic game variant, buses go always in time. Taking delays due to traffic conditions or weather conditions into account leads to other variants of the ALIENS ON THE BUS games family. There is some severe doubt that making the time schedule more complex may result in more attractive experiences of game playing. The game depends on GPS localization. There is no need for high resolution. It is sufficient to discriminate different bus stops. And there is no need at one bus stop to discriminate the one direction from the other. Players coming close to some bus stop may ask for the arrival time of the next bus. Because the virtual buses are reliable and come on schedule in real time, players may wait. When a bus arrives, it shows on display and... Fig. 4. An urban network of public transportation lines underlying the game ALIENS ON THE BUS needs any network of public transportation such as the one of Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, on display in figure 4. Cities like Berlin, London, Mexico City, New York, Paris, and Tokyo, for instance, offer more complexity. But this is irrelevant to the game playing experience. For simplicity, there is not made any distinction between buses, trams, subways, monorails, and other means of public transportation. They are all uniformly used and named buses, for short. It becomes obvious the ALIENS ON THE BUS is more a game family than a single game. It has many parameters. By setting parameters, one determines an instance of this family. Fig. 5. An alien on the bus showing and approaching the human player... in case there is an alien aboard the bus, it shows as well. Players may receive gratifications when talking to the alien.

6 B. Aliens on the Bus as a Family of Games Let us begin with the final issue of the preceding subsection: communication with the alien on the bus. There are overwhelmingly many alternatives of what to talk about with aliens. Every design decision is determining another sub-category within the ALIENS ON THE BUS games family. In case human players do not talk at all, they may score points, at least, for meeting an alien. But communication may be more involved. Aliens may ask questions to the human players and, vice versa, humans may ask questions to the aliens. The contents of communication may turn the particular game instance into a serious game. Players may learn about the city, for instance, by becoming involved in a conversation about related issues. But aliens may be interested in unlimited topics such that playing the game might confront human players to a large spectrum of questions. Aliens may even ask human players for real activities in the physical environment. In this way, ALIENS ON THE BUS may become an exergame. When going a bit more systematically for an investigation of the ALIENS ON THE BUS digital games family, one easily recognizes the following few dimensions of design decisions: the underlying public transportation network, the time schedule of buses (and the like), the junctions of lines, the number of aliens and their distribution on the buses in the network, the way in which aliens change lines at junctions, the contents of communication, the scenarios of communication acts, the peculiarities of different agents which may behave differently, the gratifications for players, the explicitly provided options of communication between players, and so on. Further dimensions arise when the human players activities are not seen individually, but understood as series of actions over time. In case aliens have identities, so to speak, distinguishing them mutually, meeting the same agent again might be rewarded in some particular way. Even agents might remember the human players they met before. Interestingly, games of the ALIENS ON THE BUS digital games family are not easily characterized by the numbers of players involved. You may simply play the game by yourself. But you may also draw benefit from your social relationships. Call your friends and ask them whether or not they saw an alien on the bus. From such an information, you may derive where and when to catch this alien once more. But be aware of aliens change at junctions. Based on some knowledge about the real transportation network, players may collaboratively go for catching aliens on the bus. To sum up, the space of ALIENS ON THE BUS games has numerous dimensions and contains (almost) uncountably many instances all of them having in common just some basic idea. For this paper, the authors confine themselves to the essentials. C. Aliens on the Bus in the Light of Games Analysis The ALIENS ON THE BUS games family has been designed in response to certain findings reported in section?? before. Here are some requirements the authors have been targeting at: The digital game world shall have its own dynamics widely independent of the human players behavior. The changes in the digital world shall establish interesting, relevant meaning for the human game playing. The dynamics, complexity, and relevance of the digital world shall not require any game master intervention. Despite its dynamics, the essentials of the digital game world shall be perceivable by the human players. To meet the expectations above, the digital game world s high level storyboard on display in figure 6 (more storyboard details will follow in the next subsection) specifies a certain autonomous virtual traffic system together with the virtual agents using it for traveling. The dynamics, the complexity, and the interestingness of the digital game world may be controlled Fig. 6. Top level of the autonomous virtual traffic of ALIENS ON THE BUS by modifications of the traffic system as well as by varying the aliens behavior. At a first glance, the real game world is even simpler than in the games INSECTOPIA and TREASURE referred to above. Players recognize in the real world alone at real bus stops where there are opportunities of game playing. There is no need for continuously bookkeeping player positions. Being at some real bus stop, the game system clients can request information about the virtual time table and draw conclusions about the next real opportunities of catching a virtual bus. Accordingly, human players may decide whether or not to wait for a bus. ALIENS ON THE BUS may be played as a single player game. The game design does not require any adversary, competitor, or collaborator. But the game design does also allow for and motivates competition and/or cooperation. Players may form teams and compete for meeting aliens and scoring points. The game may be also played in a completely non-competitive way. Players may inform each other about aliens on the bus to catch them more frequently and more effectively. Compared to other pervasive games, ALIENS ON THE BUS is much more flexible. For instance, TREASURE and EPIDEMIC MENACE require teams and BOTFIGHTERS and PACMANMHATTAN depend essentially on several competitors. The design of these games is considerably more rigid.

7 D. Storyboarding Aliens on the Bus The present subsection completes the specification of the ALIENS ON THE BUS pervasive games family by presenting top level storyboards of the real game world, of the digital game world, and of the inter-world communication. Within the narrow limits of the present contribution, the authors refrain from further investigation of taxonomic issues. For simplicity, we confine ourselves to the specification of figure 8 which needs to be related to some specification of the digital game world (see the virtual traffic as shown in figure 6). The inter-world communication is sketched in figure 9 where the darkest boxes deal with the bus traffic including information about aliens on the bus, whereas the medium gray box is an episode representing the possibly complex humanalien communication. In the simplest variant, one may assume that meeting an alien results in scoring points only. The inter- Fig. 7. Top level of ALIENS ON THE BUS real multi-player game world Figure 7 shows some episode on the right hand side which may be eliminated when specifying single-player versions of the game family. Collaborating players either traversing the real game world or waiting at a real bus stop may contact other players for informations about aliens on the bus for the purpose of forecasting when and where to meet an alien the next time. The following figure 8 below results from figure 7 above by elimination of the communication between players. Note Fig. 9. Principles of the inter-world communication of ALIENS ON THE BUS world communication, naturally, needs to take into account the whole digital world as summarized by means of figure 10. Fig. 8. Top level of ALIENS ON THE BUS real single-player game world that the single-player mode, naturally, allow different human players to play simultaneously. There might be easily several human players at one real bus stop waiting independently of each other for the same virtual bus. When they occasionally talk to each other, they reach a threshold between different game variants. The threshold between game playing experience according to the storyboard cutouts of figure 8 and figure 7 relates to the discussion of meta game play vs. extra game play in [22]. Fig. 10. ALIENS ON THE BUS top level storyboard illustrating the real world, the digital world, and the inter-world communication by three shades of gray The following aspects are considered relevant to playability: (i) the space of human activities in the real world is easy to understand and easy to master, (ii) the digital world is rich in contents and works autonomously and fully computerized, (iii) the inter-world communication established comprehensible meaning to the human player.

8 VI. HIERARCHIES OF PERVASIVE GAMES EXEMPLIFIED To warm up, so to speak, we begin with an extremely simple example of a hierarchy of pervasive games compared only with respect to a single dimension of digital game world activities. What is ongoing in the digital world of the game? Just bookkeeping? Or is there, so to speak, some virtual life? Instead, the authors are going to present another hierarchy which derives directly from analyzing the games storyboards. As discussed throughout this paper, the communication between the two game worlds, the real and the virtual one, is essential to the characteristics of playing a pervasive game. Five of the storyboards presented above indicate by dashed and dotted lines those essentials of the game under consideration. Along the vertical dimension on display in fig. 13, there are indicated some essential features of inter-world communication such as the following: (i) The virtual world has its own dynamics and the player gets information about the changing states; his actions may have some impact on this dynamics. (ii) The virtual world has its own dynamics, the player gets information about it, but has no impact. (iii) The virtual world is static and the player perceives information about its state. Dealing with the dynamics of the virtual world, it is interesting where it comes from. Therefore, the lower axis of coordinates represents supervision, again, just opposing much to no. The third axis without annotations describes a continuum of expected efforts needed for setting up the conditions of game playing. For visualization reasons, the closer some point is to the origin of coordinates, the more setup efforts are necessary. Fig. 11. Pervasive games systematized in some one-dimensional space Pervasive games are placed in the hierarchy accordingly. When two games are overlapping one slightly above the other, this indicates that the criterion meets the upper one a bit more comprehensively. The playability of a pervasive game depends enormously on the need for human supervision. Supervision is expensive. Fig. 13. Pervasive games partially ordered in a three-dimensional space; for the sake of readability, the number of pervasive games mentioned is restricted Fig. 12. Pervasive games systematized according to supervision needs Readers may imagine to combine hierarchies like the two above within some two-dimensional space. A visualization like that would allow for more easily separating games which are close together if only one dimension is taken into account. Those pervasive games that appear close to the origin of coordinates may be considered problematic. Pervasive games are promising for many reasons such as game based learning and the opportunities of integrating real world intentions such as, e.g., marketing into playful settings. But their design is problematic and needs many intellectual tools including visualizations of game characteristics.

9 VII. SUMMARY &CONCLUSIONS Though some readers might like the ALIENS ON THE BUS games concept, this is not the authors intended innovation. In general, the authors believe that just a new digital game or even a somehow novel family of games can hardly deserve to be considered a games innovation. The innovation (or, at least, what the authors consider to come close to an innovation) is to see pervasive games from the perspective of storyboarding à la [23] and to systematize pervasive games accordingly. A. Related Work There are a few other publications providing approaches to the systematization of pervasive applications such as [13], [17], [30], and [48]. The taxonomic approach of [13] addresses pervasive applications, in general, including the supervision of herds of cows and of zebras in the wild and, e.g., locating lost hikers in wilderness areas. It is diverse and less formal. Hinske et al. [17] present a large amount of valuable thoughts about game playing, in general, and about pervasive games and mixed reality, as they call it, in particular. But in contrast to the paper s promising title, they do not classify pervasive games. Magerkurth et al. [30] provide an excellent survey useful to base upon systematizations, but they do not touch the subject of systematization itself. Similarly, [48] surveys pervasive games, but does not contribute more insights than the other three references mentioned. B. Original Contribution Pervasive games are imaginary games in the sense of [3]. The design of imaginary games includes the design of real and virtual props, a term used by Walton within the framework of his make-believe theory of representations [49]. Storyboarding is the anticipation and the organization of human experience [23]. Structural properties of storyboards characterize the design of real and virtual props toward intended effects like learning, collaboration, competition, and fun. C. Limitations of the Storyboarding Approach As already said by the end of section IV, storyboarding is not the all-in-one device suitable for every purpose of pervasive games classification. For instance, the amount of supervision necessary for playing some game can hardly be seen from the storyboard. But for many games such as EPIDEMIC MENACE, e.g., the administrative overload turned out to be one of the obstacles to success. Even administration in the small may be problematic such as, e.g., the continuous monitoring and control of time players spend in some room when playing PERVASIVE CLUE. The authors advocate pervasive games without any need for human supervision. The present approach is throwing light on pervasive games from the one side; but it will surely be valuable to look from another side as well. VIII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This publication was completed when the second author has been serving as a so-called Specially Appointed Professor at the Hokkaido University Sapporo, Japan, in Summer The authors gratefully acknowledge the cooperation with many colleagues and friends who have been engaged in a manifold of research oriented game designs and implementations. The following order does not reflect any degree of esteem. Andrea Hofmann, supported by Shenja Brückner, brought her serious game SPAT to application in some sheltered workshop. Denise Lengyel designed, implemented, and evaluated her own adventure game to explicate the correlation of personality features and game playing behaviors. Anja Hawlitschek designed some serious game for German schools which has been implemented by Christoph Kutza and some more students. GORGE is a game designed by the second author and developed in a larger number of versions with graphics by Sandy Stehr implemented by Florentin Bader under careful supervision by Swen Gaudl and, later on, re-implemented (including some touch-screen variant) by Christian Woelfert. Currently, TRAST is some business application project bringing game basedlearning into critical training environemts. The developers of the game component are Jun Fujima and Sebastian Arnold. CATCH 22 is a game-based learning project managed by Jacqueline Krebs and implemented by Antonio Purrmann with substantial artwork by Christian Kirchner. Last but not least, there is some new implementation of Anja Hawlitschek s game in preparation. Julia Schubert provides the new storyboard and Stefan Sachse is providing the implementation in UNITY 3D. 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