selectparks - Submission: If all the World were a Game...

BACKSEAT PLAYGROUND

John Paul Bichard - Liselott Brunnberg - Oskar Juhlin

http://www.tii.se/mobility/BSP/

So you're sitting in the back seat of a car staring out of the window - imagine that the world moving past you is a vast game engine - the objects, places and people around you are all part of an intertwining series of episodes that make up an ongoing game plot...

...what if you could search the bottom of the riverbed beneath the bridge you just drove over, using an aqualung you picked up from the last village... what if there were dark tales waiting to be uncovered in the forest coming up... what if the person sitting in the back seat of the car in front is the detective searching for you...

Backseat Playground is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a car.

We are looking at 4 core areas:

1 Episodic Narratives - a way of building narratives that work as fragmented and incomplete episodes, informing an overall plot depending on the journey travelled - this will be combined with both on and offline non-plot actions that will encourage players to further explore their environment and the in-game objects and stories.

2 Real World Game Engine - where the game engine is embedded in the 'real' - using GIS database objects as game objects and assigning game properties to these real objects. This will allow objects in the real world to function as game objects with multiple properties i.e. ability to combine objects, to query them, affect the narrative and allow the player to collect resources from the real environment.

3 De-focusing technology - how to turn the player's attention away from the small screen and onto their everyday surroundings through the use of lightweight mobile devices (subtly enhanced).

4 Fuzzy Learning - to encourage kids to enquire about and explore their environments, local history and geography through 'real world' gameplay.