Shhh!
Published at the Advances in Computer Entertainment 2013 Annual Conference
Description
The aim of this project was to build and evaluate a Pervasive game for a challenging environment and promote mischief within the players behaviour. The environment chosen for this game was a library.
This game was intriguing to develop as it broke the traditional rules of the library and promoted mischievous behaviour in the player. However to build a successful game that does this while also maintaining the fun factor that all games must have, research was conducted.
This research was broken down into sections, with the first being about what actually defines a game, by looking at previous research and see how they defined what a game is, and what the important elements of one are.
The next section was to look at examples of games from the pervasive genre, this was done in order to make a potentially successful game, one must understand what made other games successful and if there was anything they could have added to make these games even better.
Shhh! has over 1k downloads on the Google Play store.
To fully obtain an understanding of how people perceive the correct behaviour for the chosen libraries, research was conducted by taking a set number of participants and questioning them on how they behave when they go into a library and also find out what the really get up to whilst there. The information received was taken into consideration and helped design a better game.
Once the game was designed and developed, it was tested by chosen participants and they then took part in an open discussion to talk about their experience of playing the game. A thematic analysis was conducted on the data collected from these discussions in order to gain a better understanding of how the game and rules of the environment truly influenced the players behaviour and whether their behaviour was manipulated into changing the tester into being 'naughty'. This would hopefully provide evidence of the fun element of the game coming from the encouragement the game has on players into intentionally breaking the rules of the social environment.