Seamful Design for Location-Based Mobile Games

In Seamful Design for Location-Based Mobile Game, Gregor Broll (Embedded Interaction Research Goup in Münich) and Steve Benford (Mixed Reality Lab) present Tycoon, a location-based multiplayer trading game that uses the different GSM cells within a designated gaming area. This paper do not talk about any results in using the game, but rather how they designed Tycoon to show seams of the ubiquitous environment when needed.

The sources of seams due to technical limitations are plentyfull in many ubicomp systems.

Patchy network coverage, fluctuating signal strength, deviations in positioning and the generally limited resources provided by mobile devices are an everyday reality for their users. Usually they experience these limitations indirectly as sketchy and slow mobile internet access, variations in the quality of speech transmission, loss of connections or ambiguities in positioning. Contrary to seamless design, seamful design tries to reveal inevitable seams in ubicomp systems and use them to increase the awareness for system infrastructure, their heterogeneous components and otherwise neglected yet useful information within the system.

Mark Weiser is that the source of seamful design

As part of his vision on ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser called for invisibility as a general design goal of ubiquitous computing and especially for invisible tools that don’t intrude on the user’s consciousness but let him focus on the task and not the tool itself. [...] Despite its benefits of comfort and simplicity, the paradigm of seamlessness is questioned. Mark Weiser actually opposed it as a misleading concept. Instead of making everything the same, reducing different component in a seamless system to tht level of a “lowest common denominator” and sacrificing their uniqueness for the goal of overall compatibility, he calls for “seamful systems” which paraphras as: “making everything the same is easy; letting everything be itself, with other things, is hard”.

Inaccurate positioning is a very common seam. People using positioning system experience those seams as uncertainties about their current position. In seamful design it is important to indentify 3 key problems:

• understanding which seams are important
• presenting seams to users
• designing interactions with seams

Giving the ability to play with the seams may ultimately lead to the more general concept of designing for appropriation.

Design for appropriation allows users to interact with seams individually, take advantage of the gaps and limitations in ubicomp infrastructures and develop new patterns of behaviors that have not been considered during the initial design of the system.

Key references:

• Weiser, M.: The world is not a desktop. ACM Interactions 1(1) (1994) 7-8.
• Chalmers, M., MacColl, I.: Seamful and Seamless Design in Ubiquitous Computing. Technical Report Equator-03-005, Equator [Technical Reports] (2003)
• Weiser, M.: Creating the invisible interface (invited talk). ACM Conf on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST94) (1994), 1

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