On Design of Location-based Games for Learning (Invited Talk at EEE Workshop, Barcelona,

1. EEE Project Workshop,
Univ. Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona, September 12, 2012
On Designing
Location-based
Games for Learning
Nikolaos Avouris
University of Patras, Greece
1

2. The UPatras HCI Group
• Activity: Emphasis on
Interactive Software
Design and Evaluation
• Size: 15+ researchers
and support group
• Infrastructure: Tools
for interactive
applications design,
development and
evaluation (Usability
Laboratory )
2

3. Location-based games
• Multiplayer games in which the play is affected
by the players’ location. They involve
embedding location specific and contextual
information in physical spaces, so to create an
interlinked physical and digital space . This is
achieved through the use of mobile devices,
wireless and sensing technologies.
• Alternative terms used are hybrid reality games
(emphasis in the interlinking of physical and digital
realities), augmented reality games, or pervasive
games (emphasis on the extension of game in
temporal, spatial and social dimensions). 3

4. Location-based games & learning
De Souza & Delacruz (2006) claim that location-
based games facilitate learning :
• Social learning
– Multiuser activities content is created through
communication and collaboration
• Experiential learning
– The game provides opportunities for action and
reflection on action
• Situated learning
– Activity in relevant physical location
term used= augmented reality games 4

5. Location-based games & learning
Schrier (2006) proposed an evaluation
framework for location-based games based
on so called 21st century learning skills:
5
http://www.p21.org/

6. Location based games architecture
user profiles,
user profiles,
historical data
historical data
Game Engine
Game Engine Virtual
Virtual
Run-time support
Run-time support information
information
space
space
3
(1) Interaction between
Object jj
Object Object ii
Object players
(2) Interaction with objects
in physical space
(3) Interaction with game
1 engine
2
Physical Space
6
From [Avouris&Yiannoutsou 2012]

7. Interactivity modalities for location-
based games
• QR codes/ NFC scanning
• Image recognition
• Gestures
• Location-based instructions encoding
7

8. Scanning interaction modalities
QR codes (quick response codes)
(From Derby Museum, Connection to
QRPedia)
NFCtags (Near Field
Communication)
Source: NFC at Museum of London, Nokia
(Youtube) 8

9. Gesture interaction modalities
Source: RExplorer
(Youtube)
Scan an image
(GoogleGoggles)
Gesture-based
Source: Google Goggles at the
interaction
Getty Museum (Youtube) 9

10. Location-based instructions encoding
for progressing narration
• Ruyi from
whaiwhai
(youtube, TGR)
10
http://www.whaiwhai.com/en

11. Location-based games spaces
Narrative space
or game space
the game-
virtual- Virtual
physical (digital)
space
spaces
are linked
Physical space
through
technology
11

12. Location-based games: examples
• The most cited (first generation) location
based games: Savannah [Benford, 04], [Benford, 05a],
[Benford 05b], FeedingYoshi [Bell, 06], Mobilegame
[Schwabe 05], [Göth, 04], UncleRoy [Benford, 06], Camelot
[Verhaegh, 06], [Soute, 07], [Soute, 10], CitiTag [Vogiazou, 07],
[Vogiazou, 05], Relive the Revolution (RTR), [Schrier 06],
[Schrier 05], CityExplorer [Matyas 07], [Schlieder 06], Hitchers
[Drozd 06], Mogi [Licoppe 08], [Licoppe 05], Jindeo [Licoppe 06],
Riot! [Blythe 06], Frequency1550 [Raessens 07],
MobileHunters [Lonthoff 07] and AlienRevolt [De Souza
12
08].
From [Avouris&Yiannoutsou 2012]

13. Location Based Games Classification
Ludic tradition
Treasure Hunts
Action games
Role Playing Games
Pedagogic tradition
Participatory Simulators
Situated Language Learning
Educational action games
Hybrid tradition
Museum Games
Mobile fiction
13
From [Avouris&Yiannoutsou 2012]

14. Location-based games: examples
• The most cited (first generation) location
based games: Savannah [Benford, 04], [Benford, 05a],
[Benford 05b], FeedingYoshi [Bell, 06], Mobilegame
[Schwabe 05], [Göth, 04], UncleRoy [Benford, 06], Camelot
[Verhaegh, 06], [Soute, 07], [Soute, 10], CitiTag [Vogiazou, 07],
[Vogiazou, 05], Relive the Revolution (RTR), [Schrier 06],
[Schrier 05], CityExplorer [Matyas 07], [Schlieder 06],
Hitchers [Drozd 06], Mogi [Licoppe 08], [Licoppe 05], Jindeo
[Licoppe 06], Riot! [Blythe 06], Frequency1550 [Raessens
07], MobileHunters [Lonthoff 07] and AlienRevolt [De
Souza 08]. 14
From [Avouris&Yiannoutsou 2012]

15. Savannah [Benford, 04], [Benford, 05]
Role playing simulation game, players move in the
Savannah, try to survive as a lion 15

16. Savannah [Benford, 04], [Benford, 05]
Reflection phase interface
16

17. Location-based simulation games:
Environmental Detectives
A place-based game created by
MITtargeted at high school and
university students. Students
played the role of environmental
engineers presented with an
environmental emergency. The
goal was to locate the source of a
spill, identify the responsible party,
design a remediation plan, and
brief the authorities on any health
and legal risks -all within two hours
17
http://education.mit.edu/ar/ed.html

18. Situated Language Learning
HELLO [Liu &Chu, 2010]
The students played a game in which they used a
mobile device to practice listening and speaking during
their free time, to perform a treasure hunt game in the
18
campus.

19. Educational action games:
MobileMath [Wijers, 2010]
• Like an action game: This game involves teams of players who compete
on a playing field, with the goal to cover as much area as possible by
constructing squares, rectangles or parallelograms using mobile phones
with GPS receivers. This is done by physically walking to and clicking on
each vertex (point).
19

20. Games with not explicit
pedagogical goal
(e.g. in sites of culture)
Ghost of a Chance
• Role Playing Game, Players were asked to
interpret weekly challenges by creating and
mailing artifacts to the Museum.
• Entered into the museum’s collection, these
items represented a player-generated gallery
collection that unlocked further clues in the
game’s narrative.
http://ghostsofachance.com/ 20

21. Ghost of a Chance
Smithsonian American Art MuseumUser-submitted images
from the "Ghost of a Chance" interactive multimedia game at
the Smithsonian American Art Museum 21

22. Harnessing the social power:
Crowdsourcing games
• Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks
traditionally performed by specific individuals
to an undefined large group of people or
community (crowd) through an open call
22

23. Freeze Tag!
23

24. http://tagger.steve.museum/
24

25. Dora’s lost data
http://museumgam.es/dora/ 25

26. Crowd sourcing tasks
• Stating preferences, voting on interesting
objects, comments etc.
• Tagging: unstructured text associated with
objects
• Debunking, criticizing: arguing against other
peoples’ ideas, tags etc.
• Recording personal stories: personal
memories associated to a museum object
• Linking objects or categorising: grouping of
objects or associating them with themes (e.g.
card sorting, museumscrabble)
[M.Ridge, Everyone wins: Crowdsourcing games & Museums, MuseumNext, May 2011] 26

27. Crowdsourcing games
• They are fun and engaging
• They are productive
• Have high learning potential with sense of
ownership of new knowledge (information
and skills)
• The museums learn too and adapt to their
audience
• Help players acquire, test and master new
skills
[M.Ridge, Everyone wins: Crowdsourcing games & Museums, MuseumNext, May 2011] 27

28. Ookl mobile app
http://www.ooklnet.com
28

29. Ookl tell your own story
29

30. ookl: citizen curator
30

31. Location-based Games
Design
Guidelines
[Ardito et al. 2011]
31

32. Collaborative study of U.Patras and
U.Bari 2010-2011 (network TwinTide)
• Followed a ‘case study methodology’
• Analysis of published papers of 3 mobile
games
• Identified game design issues (317 issues)
• Through focus group analysis the issues were
reduced to 94 related to design of location-
based games and learning
• Card sorting techniques for grouping the
issues in 5 design dimensions
32

33. Design Dimensions (Ardito et al. 2011)
• Game General Design, which refers to issues related to the
overall game design process;
• Control/Flexibility, which is a basic dimension of system
usability, that with respect to the games considered in this paper, also
refers to helping players to be aware of the effects of their choices on
the game execution;
• Engagement, which informs on how to provide an experience that
captivates the players, by providing hints on how to structure the
game, which tools to adopt, etc.;
• Educational Aspects, which informs on interweaving of
learning content into the game context, so that the game can have a
valid learning influence on the players;
• Social Aspects, which concerns the interaction among the
players, role allocation etc. (the underlying assumption is that social
activity, e.g. competition, can act as a motivational factor).
33

34. #1. Game General Design
1.1 Exploit metaphors from real-life games, activities, stories
Minimize changes to the physical place (e.g. modifications to the
1.2 physical structure, installation of special equipment like projectors, big
displays, etc.)
Create a multidisciplinary design team (including e.g. HCI, cultural
1.3
heritage, educational experts)
Perform formative evaluations and pilot studies to check if tasks’
1.4
difficulty is appropriate for the intended players
Consider the social conventions of the place (e.g. not laughing in a
1.5
church)
Consider to extend the game experience beyond the game session
1.6
(e.g. participating in a web community)
Consider to include activities/events that are not part of the game,
1.7 but happen in the real world (e.g. the ceremony of change of the guard
at noon)
1.8 Consider to include a game master (e.g. tutor, supervisor, coordinator)
and her role: e.g. enforcing the rules, narrating the story 34

35. #4. Educational Aspects
Consider to include a pre-game activity to prepare players (e.g. some
4.1 lessons in classroom explaining the historical context in which the game
is set)
Game should emphasize either vertical or horizontal exploration of a
place/topic, i.e., deeply exploring a limited space (or few objects or a
4.2
specific topic) vs. more superficially exploring a broad space (or many
objects or several topics)
Tasks should require players to link areas, locations, physical objects to
4.3
concepts, topics, etc.
4.4 Balance between competition and knowledge acquisition. Too much
competition may have a negative impact on knowledge acquisition
Include a debriefing phase after the game to allow players to reflect on
the game experience. Design it as an individual/collaborative
4.5
game/activity that supports players to clarify and consolidate the game
experience
35

36. Validation of the guidelines: The
Pompeii Design Workshop
36

37. The Pompeii Design Workshop
A location-based game design
workshop structured in order to
follow the use of guidelines and other
background designers’ knowledge for
structuring design activity of
location-based games
37
http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/pompeiigame/

38. The Pompeii Design Workshop
• The participants were organized in groups of 3
to 5. Each group worked out the idea and
description of design for a location-based game
for the site of Pompeii. They used the
worksheet and supporting background material.
• The workshop so far has been run in 4 cases in
Greece, Italy and France.
•26 (3 to 14) designs were produced during these
sessions. [Sintoris et al. forthcoming, 2013]
38
http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/pompeiigame/

39. The Pompeii Design Workshop
Material
One instruction card for the participants
One map of Pompeii, showing the location of six
important places
A description of the six places, in the form of text with
photos (print on single-sided A3 sheet)
Two concepts cards, that describe in some detail
concepts that might be intersting learning topics
A Worksheet, where the designers record their design.
The instructions printed on the worksheet are intented
as guides and one should insist on "filling" them out
with vigor. 39

40. Pompeii workshop: The worksheet
• Title Have you thought about a title?
• What are the components of the game. The actions of the players, the rules
and mechanisms. The tools the players have, the aims and behaviours. As an
example think of scrabble: The tiles with the letters, the points according to
rarity of a letter, the board, tha randomness of the tiles.
• The objective
• What is the aim of the game? What will you explain to the players that they
have to do? How will the player know about success?
• The rules What are the basic rules? How are the guide the game to the end?
Are there roles? Is there a narrative?
• Use of tools & technology How will the smartphones be used? As
information screens, communication, barcode scanners, GPS, maps, radar,
compass, flashlight...?
• Mechanisms How are the rules enforced? How is the game paced? Is there
immersion in the atmosphere of the game? What about player
communication? Awareness of the actions of the other players? Competion?
Cooperation? Deception?
• Location and real-world objects How are they involved in the game? How
are the players interacting with them?
• Behaviours and aesthetic result How do you expect the game to evolve
over time? How will the players feel playing it? 40

41. Design of location based games
Reflection on our own experience:
• MuseumScrabble – museum game
• InvisibleCity RvS – city game
41

42. MuseumScrabble: linking exhibits
• Task to build connections between exhibits and
themes/concepts that can be linked to more than
one exhibit with different strength according to its
relevance to the theme
• The concepts may be embeded in a narrative that
the players have to follow
• Game is played by groups playing against each
other
• Players fight for resources (exhibits) as they capture
the exhibits not allowing the opponents to use it.
42
http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/museumscrabble/

43. MuseumScrabble
link exhibits to themes/concepts
[Youtube:
museumscrabble]
43

44. 44

45. 45

46. 46

47. Design rationale
• MuseumScrabble is based on the idea of the
popular Scrabble word game. In Scrabble, the
aim is to arrange tiles (letters) in meaningful
sequences (words).
47

48. From a board game to location-based game
• In MuseumScrabble, the constructs letters that can be
arranged to form words, have been replaced by topics and
exhibits. They can be linked using special sentences, the
hints.
• A topic is a concept or field of knowledge or category, related
to parts of the museum collection or the themes of the
museum. Examples are geography, feminism, religion, art
etc.
• Each topic contains several hints. A hint is a short sentence
that can be applied to exhibits in the museum related to the
topic.
• The challenge to the players is to link an exhibit to a relevant
topic by discovering which exhibit fits the particular topic-
hint pair in a meaningful way.
Evaluation of MuseumScrabble: [Sintoris et al. 2010] 48

49. New version: Benaki Museum Scrabble
• New game flow [Karpathiotaki et al. 2012]
• New narrative
• Different kind of
exhibits – historic
period
• Strong link to
non exhibited
objects
http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/bms/ 49

50. http://www.invisiblecity.gr/
50

51. 51

52. 52

53. Flow of Mafia game 53

54. Flow of RvS game 54

55. Flow of RvS game 55

56. 56

57. à Learning
57

58. 58

59. Adding digital content in the city
59

60. 60

61. 61

62. 62

63. 63

64. 64

65. 65

66. 66

67. Real-world testing
67

68. contribution of tasks/riddles by the
players
Mission tasks may be
contributed through a web site
(e.g. a school teacher can
design a specific version of the
game for a school party)
[Sintoris et al. 2011 ] 68

69. Game content editor
(google+ app)
69
Rubén Muñoz and Christos Sintoris, 2012

70. Active participation of the public is a
mission for institutions of culture
Nina Simon:
The Participatory Museum
70

71. Player-created/adapted Games
By developing their own Games students can
show what they have learned, and they can
also “explore various hypotheses” using the
game (Klopfer, 2008).
Director view vs Actor view in Frequency 1550
(Akkerman et al. 2009)
User configuration of game elements is a tool
for learning (Yiannoutsou et al. 2011).
71

72. New authoring tools to involve players
in game creation adaptation
e.g. Taleblazer
• TaleBlazer is a new rich Internet
application from MIT's STEP lab to
author smartphone location-based
augmented reality (AR) games. For
location-based AR game building.
• Features :
– Visual blocks-based scripting
– Interactive data layers and sampling -
create models for player exploration and
discovery of scientific topics.
– Conditional dialog creator - interact with
characters in new ways
http://education.mit.edu/projects/taleblazer 72

73. The way ahead
• Patterns for migration of traditional
games to location-based games
• Narrative dimension in contextualizing
digital space and linking to physical
space
• User participation in game design and
adaptation, methods and tools, the
social trail
73

74. http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/lmmgs2013/
74

75. refs
C. Ardito, R. Lanzilotti, D. Raptis, C. Sintoris, N. Yiannoutsou, N. Avouris, M.F. Costabile, (2011).
"Designing pervasive games for learning", Proceedings, HCI International 2011, July 2011,
Orlando, Florida, USA. LNCS-6770 (PART 2) pp. 99-108, Springer.
Sintoris, C., Dimitriou, S., Yiannoutsou, N., Avouris, N.: Invisible City: Rebels Vs Spies.
http://www.webcitation.org/5xE2OsK8U (2010)
Sintoris C., Stoica A., Papadimitriou I., Yiannoutsou N., Komis V., Avouris N. (2010).
MuseumScrabble: Design of a mobile game for children's interaction with a digitally
augmented cultural space, International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction,
2(2), 53-71, April-June 2010.
de Souza e Silva, A., Delacruz, G.C.: Hybrid Reality Games Reframed: Potential Uses in
Educational Contexts. Games and Culture 1(3), 231–251 (2006)
Avouris N., Yiannoutsou, N., (2012), A review of mobile location-based games for learn-ing
across physical and virtual spaces, Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol 18.
Schrier, K.L. “Using Augmented Reality Games to Teach 21st Century Skills.” ACM SIGGRAPH
2006 Educators Program. SIGGRAPH ’06. New York, USA: ACM, 2006.
Yiannoutsou, N. & Avouris, N. (2010). Reflections on use of location-based playful narra-tives for
learning. Proc. of Mobile Learning (pp. 149–156). Porto, Portugal: Iadis Press.
Yiannoutsou, N., Avouris, N., (2012). Mobile games in Museums : from learning through game
play to learning through game design, ICOM Education, vol. 23 (2012).
Huizenga, J., Admiraal, W., Akkerman, S., & Dam, G. T., Mobile game-based learning in
secondary education: engagement, motivation and learning in a mobile city game. Journal
of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 25, (4), 2009, pp. 332-344.
Klopfer, E. (2008) Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Yiannoutsou N., Sintoris C., Avouris N, End User configuration of game elements:
Game construction as learning activity, IS-EUD 2011
Akkerman S. et al, Storification in History Education: A mobile game in and about medieval 75
Amsterdam, Computers & Education 52 (2009)

76. ευχαριστώ
hci.ece.upatras.gr/avouris
76