A Playcentric Design Process of a Storytelling Pervasive Game

Abstract: One genre of games is pervasive games and it is a concept that many forms of gaming have been grouped into. Pervasive games can be described as games that are played in social environments and influence the ordinary life of the player and the people around them. Such influence creates new challenges for the game design, since the dynamics of game and ordinary life have to be taken into consideration. When not only designing for an engaging pervasive game, but having stakeholders with certain demands as well, the challenge gets even bigger. This thesis exlores the playcentric iterative game design process in the context of a strong stakeholder's interest. More specifically, the thesis works with the design of a storytelling game that is intended to work as a tool for gathering stories. Action research is a form of reflective research where the active practitioner studies, analyzes, reflects on and improves the researcher's own work. Two of our main findings were that the direct involvement and strong opinions from the stakeholders made it hard to keep any game elements in the design and, during the design process, directed the intended game more towards an acitivity rather than a game. The playcentric approach helped us a lot during the design process. We could both test the stakeholders' preconditions in practice and get valuable feedback in return that together contributed to an engaging pervasive activity as well as a story gathering tool.