Head Up Games: The Games of the Future Will Look More Like the Games of the Past

Abstract

Abstract. With the emergence of pervasive technology, pervasive games came into existence. Most are location-aware applications, played with a PDA or mobile phone. We argue that the interaction paradigm these games support, limits outdoor play that often involves spontaneous social interaction. This paper introduces a new genre of pervasive games we call Head Up Games. The paper describes these games and how they differ from current research prototypes of pervasive games. Also, it outlines their characteristics and illustrates our vision with Camelot, an outdoor game for children.

Designing playful interactions for social interaction and physical play

“…In this game, children could explore a technology-enhanced wood [36]. A new genre of pervasive games is Head Up Games: technology enhanced games that do not require screenbased interaction and therefore allow for rich social interaction [39]. Camelot is an example of such an outdoor game in which children collaboratively create physical castles (see also the paper by Soute and Markopoulos in this special issue).…”

Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

“…The focus on outdoor play also brings about the need for interaction mechanisms more consistent with outdoor children's play. To emphasize the difference between traditional pervasive games running on handheld devices which force players to ''look down'' the envisioned games are called ''Head Up Games'' (HUGs) [10]. Our aspiration is to combine benefits of modern pervasive technology with the advantages of traditional outdoor play.…”

(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior

“…Soute and Markopoulos introduced the term Head Up Games (HUG) as a subcategory of playground props where players do not need to focus and turn their head to the devices/mobile screens during an outdoor play activity, which in turn should have positive effects on the social interactions [235,236]. For instance, Save the safe is a game that is played with a belt with a few LEDs and a vibration motor, where one player has a virtual key that is automatically passed when another player comes close, the burglars need to open a safe with the key in order to win [234].…”

“…The recent hype around Pokémon Go and its success clearly shows that these games have a large attraction value. One reason for this rise, besides targetting a nostalgic fantasy world [226], is probabaly the now easily available location-specific infrastructure [235] 1 . The games have great attraction value, are successful in getting children to move, and could partially address the obesity epidemic.…”

“…Although they have not been based explicitly on interactive play, we refer the reader to [73,120,225,226]. Soute and Markopolous propose to merge the aspects of traditional outdoor play with computer games and for their HUGs mention that technology should be simple, easy to bring along, trigger imagination (instead of unambiguous visualization), and trigger social interactions [235]. Bekker and Sturm examined how successful non-interactive play objects can be translated into open-ended play objects [22].…”