Technical Design Issues of Mobile, Collaborative and Locative Game

Mobile Learning with a Mobile Game: Design and Motivational Effects by Gerhard Schwabe, Christoph Göth at the University of Zürich, covers many technical design issues of mobile, locative and collaborative gaming I can relate to my experience with CatchBob!: Accuracy of positioning, play on the move, offline areas and response time and interface design.

Accuracy of Positioning
As soon as the players had to know the exact position of an object, the accuracy was not sufficient. They had to search in up to three rooms to find the hidden PDA in the first trial and the participants reported difficulties catching and solving location dependent tasks in our second trial. In the second trial, the law accuracy of the location information was reported as the single most important negative aspect. There were two parts to this problem: the low precision of the location information and the representation of this low precision on screen.
Play on the move
The size of the maps does not appear to be a major problem as they covered half the PDA screen and the participants did not have problems reading when standing. Rather, they did not succeed to synchronize their heads to the movemements of the device in the hand. Furthermore the cognitive load of translating an abstract two-dimensional map to into a trhee-dimensional building was high.
Offline areas and response time
Frequent updating of position is one most important requirements of mobile games. The players waht a near real-time reaction of the client. This means, the mobile game has to have both a good caching algorithm, and an efficient data transmission strategy.
Interface design
Observatin of the players showed that navigation with the drop-down menu and using the pen of the PDA was not really intuitive. The use of the PDA was much more like the use of an “automat”.

They discussus the effects of their design using the six structural elements that charecterise games: 1) rules, 2) goald and objectives, 3) outcome and feedback whci measure theh progress against tht goals, 4) conflicts, competition, challenge and opposition, 5) interaction, that is the social apsect in the game and 6) the representation or story exaggerating interesting aspects of reality.