Interweaving Mobile Games with Everyday Life

Bell, M., Chalmers, M., Barkhuus, L., Hall, M., Sherwood, S., Brown, B., Rowland, D., Benford, S., Capra, M., and Hampshire, A., “Interweaving Mobile Games with Everyday life“. In Proceedings of CHI 2006, Montreal, Canada. Forthcoming.

This paper presents a new seamful-designed location-based game called Feeding Yoshi in which the coverage and security of WiFi are integrated in the gameplay. Seamful design emerged from early ubicomp studies that raised the issues around the impact of variation or uncertainty with regard to location and network connectivity. These experiments were mainly small scaled in terms of area and duration. Feeding Yoshi plans to be large-scale and longitudinal to understand how ubiquitous computing experience actually fits with other activities.

As Weiser put it, “the unit of design should be social people, in their environment, plus your device”. We suggest that Yoshi provides an example of how this can be approached, in that many of players’ action and strategies were specific to the characteristics of the wireless access points and PDA’s networking users and interpreted on the basis of their experience and understanding of this wider context.

There is a great quote mentioning the different capabilities of 2 similar devices or as Nicolas puts it as the The uniqueness capabilities of pervasive devices.

Players also became aware of some technical features that we were only vaguely aware of ourselves. In one case, a player became aware—and angry about—the fact that his PDA’s 802.11 antenna had a significantly lower sensitivity than his team–mates’, even though they were using the same model of PDA.

We noticed similar “uniqueness of device” during our CatchBob! experiments. Similar TabletPC, similar context, similar hardware and software, had different sensitive. In the end of the experiments we knew which ones behaved better than others based in their history of connectivity issues. Uniqueness of device should actually be integrated in seamful scenarios.

Relation to my thesis: In the context of everyday computing, it become now important to set large-scale experiments. Time and area are the easiest scale to play with. I plan to work on these 2 scales also. People and devices scales are harder to deplay and support therefor mainly left on the side by most ubicomp field experiments. However with still a low-scale set of devices, the uniqueness of devices could be noticed. We often mention the heterogeneity of models of devices in ubicomp, while failing to precise that this heterogeneity exists in devices exiting the same factory line.