Seamful Games

Seamful Games is a relatively new Equator experience, stemming from the conceptual treatment of Seamfulness, which itself was derived from reflection on the City and CityWide user experiences. Those earlier experiences relied on uniformly accessible access to wireless networks and positioning systems. In user trials, participants were often either constrained in where could go while still taking part in the experience, or had to handle features such as network disconnection and variable positioning.

One traditional response to such issues is to 'design out' such gaps, breaks and seams, but we are exploring a new approach inspired by some of Mark Weiser's early writing and also by established media theory and design practice. In Seamful Games, we aim to accept or even take advantage of the characteristics of technological media, as perceived and used in users' experience. This means selectively revealing aspects of system infrastructure that are often hidden or ignored, such as where wi-fi is (and is not). To use the example of wi-fi, a place with net access may offer connection to useful services and information tailored to that place, but also may bring issues of unwanted observers and prying programs. Other places may have no net access, and offer no such context-specific information, but will have other useful or interesting things to do and see -- and offer people privacy and safety from net-mediated observation.

We have chosen the application area of mobile games, to take advantage of the creativity and stress-testing that occurs in such systems used outdoors. We initially created a game called Bill, which was a simple 'treasure hunt' game for players using PDAs with 802.11 wi-fi and GPS. Players chase, collect and steal 'coins' appearing on their PDAs' maps, all the while maintaining awareness of other players, of people and objects beyond the game, and also of the distribution of the wireless network used in the game. We continue to trial and adapt Bill, and have demonstrated it at the Ubicomp and Mobile HCI conferences.

Based on this early experience, we have developed a number of new game prototypes. We are now focusing on Feeding Yoshi, which lets us explore issues of inconsistent state among mobile devices as well as wi-fi distribution explored in Bill. Players discover and use net-connected wireless access points, which the game presents as the home of a Yoshi, an animal that likes certain fruit. Other wireless access points are presented as 'plantations', the sources of fruit to feed Yoshis. Players can also trade or steal fruit from each other, using 'ad hoc' networks set up between players' PDAs. At the moment, Feeding Yoshi is a simple hunting and trading game, and we now starting user trials and 'playtesting'. Lessons from these trials, from the trials of other seamful games, and new technical developments and collaborations will help us up advance our game systems and our interaction designs.

Binaries and Source

The Bill game (for PPC2003 & WM5 mobile devices) and the server (for standard desktop or laptops) may be downloaded here. The Visual Studio 2005 solution containing the code for both the client and the server may be found here.