Hierarchies of pervasive games by storyboarding

Abstract

Pervasive games form a problematic digital games category. On the one hand, they appear extremely promising for purposes such as learning and for encouraging players to engage in healthy outdoor activities. They widen the horizon of game contents by direct access to reality. On the other hand, a larger number of pervasive games failed badly bearing abundant evidence for the need of better understanding the essentials of pervasive games and of the experiences in playing pervasively. Hierarchies of pervasive games reveal strengths and weaknesses of those games and allow for partially ordering pervasive games. Storyboarding is an appropriate technology for the representation of several essentials characterizing experiences of game play. ALIENS ON THE BUS is some novel pervasive game to illuminate the reach of the storyboarding approach to games classification.