Investigating the effect of User Generated Content in pervasive games

Abstract

Pervasive games integrate physical and social aspects of the real world into a unified gaming experience, where virtual and physical game elements co-exist. The blending of game content with the context of the physical environment has been recognized as an important element that increases the enjoyment, interest and engagement of players in in this game genre. To address this requirement most pervasive games prototypes so far have been bound to specific locations, being heavily dependent on orchestration teams to edit game content and support the overall game execution. However, the capacity of pervasive games to be staged anywhere (i.e. their portability) is critical for their wider adoption and commercial success. Since the manual editing of game content by game developers is clearly incompatible with portability, User-Generated Content (UGC) remains as the only practical option for content provision in pervasive games. Nevertheless, the impact of UGC has not been investigated so far in the pervasive games literature. This article introduces Barbarossa, a pervasive role-playing game incorporating UGC as a means for game content generation. The user trials of Barbarossa confirmed that the use of UGC can enhance the quality of experience perceived by players. We also document good practices with respect to the effective incorporation of UGC in pervasive games, which could be useful to future developers.