Abstract
This paper presents Treasure, an outdoor mobile multiplayer game inspired by Weiser’s notion of seams, gaps and breaks in different media. Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual ’coins’ that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players’ PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps. Reporting on a study of players taking part in multiple games, we discuss how their tactics and strategies developed as their experience grew with successive games. We suggest that meaningful play arises in just this way, and that repeated play is vital when evaluating such games.
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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Barkhuus, L. et al. (2005). Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game. In: Beigl, M., Intille, S., Rekimoto, J., Tokuda, H. (eds) UbiComp 2005: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3660. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11551201_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11551201_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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