This paper reports on the design and evaluation of player experience of a Location-Based Mobile Game set in Dublin, Ireland in which players act as paranormal investigators hunting for ghosts and gathering evidence of paranormal activity. The paper focuses on players' experience of engagement and immersion, which was evaluated through a qualitative user study undertaken over a three-day period with the participation of 19 subjects. We first discuss the concept of immersion in gaming and then review related work before presenting the design and implementation of our prototype and the results of our user study. The results show that the experience succeeds in creating a high level of immersion at several stages in the game and that this immersion can be influenced by several factors including usability, control, modes of interaction, aesthetics, flow and, perhaps most significantly, choice of location.
In this paper, the development and implementation of a rich sound design, reminiscent of console gaming for a location aware game, Viking Ghost Hunt (VGH) is presented. The role of audio was assessed with particular attention to the effect on immersion and emotional engagement. Because immersion also involves the interaction and the creation of presence (the feeling of being in a particular place) these aspects of the sound design were also investigated. Evaluation of the game was undertaken over a three-day period with the participation of 19 subjects. The results gained imply that audio plays an important role in immersing a player within the game space and in emotionally engaging with the virtual world. However, challenges in regards to GPS inaccuracy and unpredictability remain, as well as device processor constraints, in order to create an accurate audio sound field and for the real-time rendering of audio files.
Abstract. Dramatic improvements in smartphones over the last few years have positioned them as a major platform for interactive media content. In addition to being much more portable than laptop computers, smartphones also support a sophisticated combination of GPS, sensors and communications interfaces that allow extracting context information related to their environment, such as location, orientation and weather data. This combination of mobility and context-sensitivity opens up interesting possibilities in relation to interactive narrative, and for example allows audience immersion into an interactive story to be improved by placing the content in physical locations that are of direct relevance to the story. In this paper, we present a general-purpose narrative architecture that allows a considerable range of story-based game and guide content to be expressed in location-aware manner. We also present a case study of an actual location-aware augmented reality game, which demonstrates the architecture in a commercial setting and shows that it is sufficiently lightweight to run on the current generation of smartphones.
This paper is concerned with challenges and solutions related to the use of smartphones as a location-based mobile gaming (LBMG) platform. We present here a summary of our experiences from building a feature-rich story-driven LBMG for the Android platform. The game uses location, handset orientation and marker-less augmented reality to support its core mechanics, which in turn support a strong story line.
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