The last deliverable of the IPERG project is of interest for people into pervasive gaming development/observation. The iperg project is EU funded research consortium that looks at pervasive gaming from a multi-disciplinary angle (since the consortium is composed of researchers from various disciplines). The document describes the evaluation of "a prototype public performance called Day of the Figurines, a slow pervasive game in the form of a massivelymultiplayer boardgame that is played using mobile phones via the medium of text messaging".

This deliverable presents an evaluation of a first public test of this version of Day of the Figurines that took place in London in Summer 2005 and that involved 85 players over a month. This evaluation draws on multiple perspectives, including analysis of exit questionnaires from players, ethnographic study of behindthescenes control room activities, and descriptive statistics derived from system logs, in order to establish a rich picture of how the game was experienced from the perspectives of both players and operators.

Why do I blog this? The whole document is a great read to be informed about problems, highlights, players' reaction, communication that occured. It's also very good to have both the perspective of the players AND the operator. The game designer's role is even more prominent when gaming is set in physical space because there are other constraints to deal with. The title of the document is quite evocative: "The City as Theatre Evaluation": that we can read as "landscape as a game interface" or "city as a performative infrastructure".