[MyResearch] Location-Based Games: coping with uncertainty

Steve Benford, Rob Anastasi,Martin Flintham, Adam Drozd, Andy Crabtree, and Chris Greenhalgh (Mixed Reality Laboratory) and Nick Tandavanitj, Matt Adams, and Ju Row-Farr (Blast Theory): Coping with Uncertainty in a Location-Based Game.

Such games (BotFighters!, Battlemachine) provide an interesting focus for research, offering an open space in which you can create a wide variety of experiences—both collaborative and competitive.(...) As a research vehicle, we’ve hoped to test our technology in the most realistic and stressful situations we can, moving from the lab to the field and giving access to numerous users. This builds on the approach of staging public performances as a research method that we’ve developed since 1996. (...) For our analysis, we drew on three data sources: ethnographic observations of players, runners, and technical crew—including video data capture and transcription; system log analysis such as GPS, network traffic, and over 3,000 online player chat messages; and player feedback email.

The paper deals with different kind of uncertainty in those location-based games.