Pervasive Games with Persistent Worlds

Abstract

This book scrutinizes pervasive games from a technological perspective, focusing on the sub-domain of games that satisfy the criteria that they: make use of virtual game elements. In the computer game industry, the use of a game engine to build games is common; the major incentive for employing a reusable game engine being reduced development time and cost. If pervasive games are to reap the same benefits, then engines for pervasive games must be available. But, current game engines do not support pervasive games that, move the game beyond the computer screen, out into the physical world, unbound by scheduled play times and possibly involving unknowing bystanders. Since the computer game industry is already rich with game engines, this book investigates: (i) if a game engine can be repurposed to stage pervasive games; (ii) if features describing a would-be pervasive game engine can be identified; (iii) using those features, if an architecture be found in the same ‘product line’ as an existing engine and if that architecture can be extended to stage pervasive games (iv) and, finally, if there any challenges and open issues that remain. The approach to answering these questions is two fold. First, a survey of pervasive games is conducted, gathering technical details and distilling a component feature set that enables pervasive games (see Chap. 2). Second, a type of game engine is chosen as candidate in the same product line as a would-be pervasive game engine, supporting as much of the feature set as possible. The architecture is extended to support the entire feature set and used to stage a pervasive game called Codename: Heroes (see Chap. 3).

The conclusion of this book is also two fold: the resulting feature set, is verified to coincide with the definition of pervasive games and related work seems to corroborate the set. Second, because the sub-domain of games in question makes use of a persistent virtual world, a virtual world engine is selected as candidate in the same product line as a would-be pervasive game engine. Codename: Heroes was successfully implemented, reaping the benefits of using the selected engine; development time was low, spanning just a few months. Codename: Heroes was staged twice, with no stability issues or down time. And, finally, a set of challenges and open issues is summarized (see Chap. 4).