#location-based games

I am running a workshop for the Electronic Literature Organization 10th September 2024 over Zoom: bit.ly/elo-salon I will be covering inspirations and explorations, and of course campus induction games.

As luck would have it, Actionbound is running a beginner's workshop tomorrow night. You could be an expert within 24 hours! https://en.actionbound.com/academy/beginners-course-110924

"Let's create and play Actionbound with Liz Cable! bit.ly/elo-salon 4 pm UTC, noon EDT, 9 am PDT

Actionbound lets you create and share games based on your location with text, images, audio, and video.

Actionbound (https://en.actionbound.com/) is an app for creating location based games known as bounds, that players can play as individuals or in teams on their mobile phones. There is a free version for personal use, and a cheap(er) educational version that’s affordable for campus induction games. Both writer and players can add text, audio, images and video, with the option of leaderboards for different groups and customisable base games shared amongst different designers. The recent addition of logic-switches and time-released media opens up opportunities for interactive narratives and more elaborate storytelling. From scavenger hunts to psychogeography, poetry trails to wellness walks, come be inspired by the possibilities.

Liz Cable has been using and teaching Actionbound with undergraduates for several years, and has created numerous games and experiences, including summative assessments where students create a bound, and one where students work in teams to solve a bound over a week. It is a very easy to use platform – the creativity comes in how you use it.

Smart cities can be described as places where physical environments are combined with information technology to rectify socio-economic and environmental issues. While this might be the case, for the most part scholarly attention has focused on the technologies used to construct these environments. What is missing from these discussions is a deeper engagement with the lived experience of 'smart spaces', and the extent to which this confluence of the physical and digital is currently configuring new explicit and/or implicit forms of play. To this end, our workshop will explore how experiences of the city might be changing as a result of new technological practices that are currently creating both explicit and implicit playful possibilities, as well as moments of resistance that reveal socio-cultural problems of participation.

We invite researchers and practitioners from all related disciplines to contribute 4 to 6 page papers that reflect on the following topics:

The changing perceptions of smart cities in the context of human experience.

Emerging smart city technologies, such Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual reality (VR), 5g, wearable technologies and locative media.

Emerging forms of locative applications and pervasive play in a smart city context.

Techo-flanerie and Playful Mobilities: Ridesharing, novel mobilities, and emerging forms of automated play.

Laissez faire versus planned play in the city - Emerging forms of explicit play, as well as emerging forms of implicit play.

Techno-socio-cultural problems of participation that often remain hidden from discussions of ̈'smart cities'.

Methods for researching implicit and explicit forms of play in a smart city context.

Related ethical implications.

Aside from papers, we invite demonstrations of prototypes and completed projects.

Please submit your paper through the EasyChair chair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=CAP2020).

We will select submissions based on a number of criteria, including originality or controversy of the paper, the complementary nature of the authors' research background, and the quality of the authors' previous work related to the workshop topic.

At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must register not only for the workshop but also for at least one day of the conference.

The Organizers,

What I’ve Been Reading: August 14, 2016

I almost forgot to do this, so let me do it quickly. Here’s your weekly dose of stuff I read on the Internet. (more…)

P.I.G.S (Featured in Athens Plaython Festival 2012 and presented in Playpublik festival 2012)

Game Design: Elina Roinioti and Maria Saridaki Game development: Georgos Hiotis and Dimitris Arabatzis Illustration: Georgos Dimitriou

In 2012, Maria and me had an idea about designing a location based game, with elements of strategy game and a political propaganda narrative. It is safe to say that P.I.G.S was a huge project and probably beyond our strengths. There were too many technical problems to solve and too many variables to take into account and we had minimum experience in game design.

Nonetheless, we managed to overcome the obstacles and play an alternative version of the game which proved to be really fun. Ultimately, P.I.G.S taught us many things about game design and we actually received very good feedback from players and by-standers.

Interesting enough, P.I.G.S. proved to be an opportunity to understand the psychology of player, to realize that game design is about designing an experience, a total system and for that you have to always return to the player i.e. by gathering data during playtesting (informal interviews, participation etc). 

Jay-Z ‘Decoded’ campaign

Bringing a book to the streets... literally...

CLIENT BRIEF: Bing launched in 2009 into a market dominated by Google. Bing needed to increase usage and position itself as a modern choice. A younger target is key to growing Bing’s market share but is highly suspect of advertising and product claims. Our challenge was to shift perceptions in a non-traditional way among a younger target of Bing as the search engine built for today’s generation and grow usage of this new alternative to Google.