Urban Games playful storytelling experiences

for city dwellers

• Pervasive Games, take place in an expanded spatio-temporal and social situation and Urban Games, are a subset of the former genre specifically designed for urban environments

• The act of playing in the theory of the Situationists appears to be among the core social activities that take place at any given moment within the urban space.

• Under this spectrum a ludic experience as a process of recollection and identification can offer a broad field of experimentation concerning the perception of the urban space.

• Digital and non-digital ludic practices in urban spaces offer different unexploited potentials for promotion of urban and personal storytelling, “active forms of citizenship and awareness-raising on key sociocultural and political issues” as well as different educational content and further serious games based learning applications.

• Using three different urban games, based on the use of smartphones, we documented and compared the experience of players.

– A competitive street game

– An exploratory ludic/derive application

– An augmented reality adventure game

CITYgories, a hybrid urban game integrating mobile technology with pervasive gaming. The game uses the city as an urban game-board; the player is called to interact with a familiar environment in an inventive way dealing with a process of unpredictable encounters in physical space. Designed by Eleni Kolovou

• The second case study is the application Dérive a platform that allows users to explore their urban spaces in a casual way. It takes the ideals of the Situationists and merges it with digital means in order to create a tool that would imply an exploration of urban space in a random unplanned way as a game. Designed by Eduardo Cachucho and Babak Fakhamzadeh

The third game is an adventure location based game called “The Fool’s Journey”, designed in ARIS open source platform. This adventure augmented reality game, leads the player to lose herself in familiar and non familiar trails within the city discovering hidden meanings and symbols. Designed by Alexander Charisis

• All three games were played in Athens using smartphones

• Players formed groups and had these three different experiences

• Data was documented during and after the experience.

• Players were requested to retract their steps in a map

• Players characterized the more competitive game as “highly communicational” and “fun” while the other two experiences where characterized as “interesting”, “getting lost”, “re-descovering the city”, “providing new symbols to the space around us”

• Players characterized the game as an extraverted and outgoing experience while the Derive and Augmented Reality as an introverted, symbolic and even esoteric

During the spatial representation of the different routes, users described:

• The Citygories Game as the best to remember details of the urban environment and stay in focus.

• The Derive app as the most difficult to redefine the route but the most intriguing in getting to know new spaces and details

• The Augmented Reality Storytelling Game as the most helpful to remember the route. immersing into the narrative and recreating different layers of urban reality.

Conclusion

• According to the our findings, both social and personal narratives emerged regarding reality, technology, constraints of time and attention when experiencing public space.

• The urban web is decoded and fragmented into categories from the players’ point of view.

• Different platforms of ludic interactions, lead in different urban experiences based on – the type of the immersion [introvert or extravert] – the goal of the interaction [victory, explore, follow the

story] – the spatial experience [points, route, hubrid ]

Thank you for your time

Maria Saridaki – msaridaki@gmail.com

Eleni Kolovou – helkolovou@gmail.com

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens