TY - CHAP
T1 - Hitchers
T2 - 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2006
AU - Drozd, Adam
AU - Benford, Steve
AU - Tandavanitj, Nick
AU - Wright, Michael
AU - Chamberlain, Alan
PY - 2006/1/1
Y1 - 2006/1/1
N2 - Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based play. Players create digital hitch hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then drop them into their current phone cell. Players then search their current cell for hitchers, pick them up, answer their questions, carry them to new locations and drop them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers pass from player to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months shows how the seams in cellular positioning, including varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience. Building on previous discussions of designing for uncertainty and seamful design, we consider five ways of dealing with these seams: removing, hiding, managing, revealing and exploiting them. This leads us to propose the mechanism of a dynamic search focus, to explore new visualization tools for cellular data, and to reconsider the general relationship between 'virtual' and 'physical' worlds in location-based games.
AB - Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based play. Players create digital hitch hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then drop them into their current phone cell. Players then search their current cell for hitchers, pick them up, answer their questions, carry them to new locations and drop them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers pass from player to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months shows how the seams in cellular positioning, including varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience. Building on previous discussions of designing for uncertainty and seamful design, we consider five ways of dealing with these seams: removing, hiding, managing, revealing and exploiting them. This leads us to propose the mechanism of a dynamic search focus, to explore new visualization tools for cellular data, and to reconsider the general relationship between 'virtual' and 'physical' worlds in location-based games.
KW - Cellular positioning
KW - Mobile games
KW - Seamful design
KW - Ubiquitous computing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33750284944&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Book chapter
AN - SCOPUS:33750284944
SN - 3540396349
SN - 9783540396345
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 279
EP - 296
BT - UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing
A2 - Dourish, Paul
A2 - Friday, Adrian
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 17 September 2006 through 21 September 2006
ER -