Jane McGonigal on the Ubicomp Games

Nicolas pointed to me the now (partially) online PhD dissertation of Jane McGonigal entitled This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the 21st Century. In chapter 3 Colonizing Play: Citations Everywhere, or, The Ubicomp Games, she explores the role of experimental game development in producing research insights in ubicomp (in our case mutual location-awareness in physical space, technological boundaries and design strategies to be applied) and persuading that the vision of ubicomp is worth pursuing (we do that by deploying an engaging context). She discusses our work on CatchBob! with her performance studies perspective from which the ubicomp field can learn a lot, as I did while reading that chapter. I am glad she included our paper Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration as part of the “Are we there yet?” (in the 2003-2005 era) discourse. Converging with my impressions of the last UbiComp conference, it has become clear that this question cannot be answered because the “there” (ubicomp desired state) is very ill defined and fuzzy. From the pervasive games reviews by Jane (expect the later seamful games), I do not think they were setup to stage the imperfection, but that came up as an unexpected research outcome of the first real-world runs of CYSMN and CatchBob!

Even if not specifically mentioned, I think that it is understood that we used our game platform as an alibi for our research. I think that as suggested by Starner (2000) gameplay is perfectly suited to smoothing over the inevitable flaws and incompleteness of early technology deployment. However, it is true that, as underlined by Jane, we completely under-produced play. A trait of academic pervasive games is that neither the player nor the game take center stage, but rather the technological and interface aspects. The experiments stage an artificial (if not fake) world for the user to try out. Ciarletty (2005) describes this as the “fake it” environments and missions of so many ubicomp tests (in our case the influence of the experimental psychology approach that constraints us to defined an artificial task).

The dissertation bibliography is available as well.

Relation to my thesis: Happy that my work is cited outside my strict research community. As I wrote it very early in my PhD adventure (1 month), I do not consider (and was told) that the eMinds paper has of big scientific value, but this proves me that other communities (other research communities, industry, designers, artists) can profit to that type of outcomes. I intend my applied research to stay on this accessible track.

I could find some references I could use such as Albert Schmid (2003 or? 2005) encouraged his HCI audience to continue aggressibely pursuing Weiser’s vision, “confronting real people in real everyay environments” with more and more functional ubicomp prototypes. Schmid argues that “developing complex system isn’t a new problem. However when looking at ubicomp system, understanding the full complexity is often differnt and more difficult than in ares of more bounded scope.

References:

Ciarletta, Laurent. “Emulating the Future With/Of Pervasive Computing Development.” Online Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Pervasive Computing. Munich, Germany: 8-13 May 2005.

Schmidt, Albrecht. “Interacting with the Ubiquitous Computer.” Keynote lecture at the Fifth International Symposium on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. Udine, Italy: 8-11 September 2003.

Schmidt, Albrecht, Nigel Davies, James Landay, and Soctt Hudson. “Rapid Prototyping for Ubiquitous Computing.” Pervasive Computing. 4:4 October-December 2005. 15-17

Starner, Thad, Bastian Leibe, Brad Singletary, Kent Lyons, Maribeth Gandy, and Jarrell Pair. “Towards Augmented Reality Gaming.” Proceedings of IMAGINA 2000 Conference. Monaco: 31 January-2 February 2000.