The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game

In Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game, Louise Barkhuus, Matthew Chalmers, Paul Tennent, Malcolm Hall, Market Bell, Scott Sherwood, and Barry Brown present Treasure, an outdoor mobile multiplayer game inspired by Weiser’s notion of seams, gaps and breaks in different media. A seam is a break, gap or “loss in translation” in a number of tools or media, designed for use together as a uniformly and unproblematically experienced whole. Well, constant network connectivity is often assumed, but it is yet not always the case when mobile systems really are mobile. In urban areas it is likely that there are variations, gaps and overlaps in networks’ coverage.

The study and design of games has added diversity to many areas of ubicomp research. Games are not only worthy of academic attention in themselves, they introduce challenges in terms of designing enjoyable (the technical novelty can wear off very quickly) experience. The authors aimed for the game to be engaging in order to better understand the relationship between game play and the system’s design. The research question would be:

Understand how people use and react to a design which makes an element of ubicomp infrastructure an explicit part of an interaction design.

The trial participants seemed to achieve what Salen and Zimmermann call “meaningful play” through their experience in that, through multiple plays, the relationships between actions and outcomes were both discernible and integrated into the larger context of the game. For example, because of the lags in GPS, the movement of a player’s icon on the PDA was often delayed by several seconds – resulting in problems picking up coins. Most of the players learning this over the course of their games. Moreover, because some players realized the inconsistency of what was on their screen was not the same as what appeared on the other’s screens, they played more boldly, raising their shields and attempting to steal.

During the iterative development of Treasure designs often changed in response to ongoing findings, which were generally reflections from observational studies of system use.

Technically they used UDP instead of TCP for the messaging subsystem because the play often takes place on the edge of the network (weakly connected). The server “heartbeats” the game state, broadcasting all game state information (scores, positions, etc) every second across the network. The messaging system was found to be robust, but it would not scale well to high numbers of clients creating large volumes of state information and net traffic.

In the discussion section, the authors mention that their reinforced opinion that user trials of such games, and of ubicomp systems more generally, should involve repeated use and/or use over a long time than a single, short session. A recording and replaying system (lke replayer and CatchBob!’s replay tool) are of a big aid in developing tactics and strategies for future play, but may also be an important means for players to show each other how they played in the past. EA’s game Burnout rely on playbacks.

Weiser’s narrow design focus only concentrated on transparent use. It is at odds with the findings of user studies of how people develop their use of ubicomp systems through experience of both transparent and analytic use. Transparent and analytic activity use are mutually interdependent with the former unaviodably influenced by analytic activity such as handling “breakdown”, working on or adapting it. learning about it, teaching others how to use it, considering how to act so that it works better, and considering how to present oneself to others through it.

Design that makes the system so starkly open to analysis by users may seem contradictory to the design goal of “invisibillity” or “transparency” usually associated with ubicomp, but people use past, present and potential activity involving the system in developing their understanding of it.

Reference I should get my eyes on:
Chalmers, M. A Historical View of Context. J. CSCW vol 13 (2004) 223-247
Salen, K, Zimmerman, E. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press (2004)