New Uses for Mobile Pervasive Games – Lessons Learned for CSCW Systems to Support Collaboration in Vast Work Sites

New uses for mobile pervasive games – Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites by Matthew Chalmers and Oskar Juhlin, paper for the workshop about gaming at European CSCW in September 2005.

This papers discusses how the new means for spatial annotation and location awareness could possibly improve individual work, collaboration as well as learning. It focuses on how pervasive games research platforms is of benefit for specific mobile work (like infrastructure management on roads, in factories, airports, electric power lines) for the study on complex issues of coordination, learning and articulation of work, and also the contextualised social interaction that ubicomp technology can afford. The aim is to maintain a balance between the grounded experience of real settings and the open-ended potential for technical functionality.

There are similarities between many pervasive games and mobile work in vast settings since both have locations as resource and as topic, and more general issues to draw on with regard to how a large unfamiliar space becomes a place that one has experience of; that one understands in a social and practical way, and can interact in.

These games do not just support the use of locations as resource in mobile game play, but also establish collaboration on finding and marking locations, and building up experience and understanding of those locations fit into a larger picture of social and technological interaction.

We see strong and useful parallels with the situation of workers who create their work within organisational rules but also within their wider technical, social and environmental setting.

Relation to my thesis: I plan to use pervasive games like CatchBob! as a platform for my research. Such papers on bridging games with CSCW and ubicomp legitimate my approach.