Difference between revisions of "Seamful Gameplay"

Revision as of 08:18, 22 August 2012

Games where explicit knowledge of the coverage areas of underlying sensing technologies provide gameplay advantages.

Technologies can be used to allow the location of players to be input to the game state. While lack of coverage by these technologies are easily seen as problems for game designs, Seamful Gameplay makes use of the unreliability and dead spots as features that can be exploited by players.

Examples

Treasure makes use of GPS and WiFi to require players to move in and out of the detection areas of the two technologies are part of a treasure collecting game.

The runners (proffesional players) of the GPS-based game Can You See Me Now? developed tactics where they could use dead spots to temporarily disappear from the game world in order to set up ambushes.

Using the pattern

The prime use of Seamful Gameplay is to make a virtue out of dead spots arising from supporting Player-Location Proximity with technologies that do not work everywhere. This means that the pattern is difficult to apply on games that have Ubiquitous Gameplay.

Diegetic Aspects

Interface Aspects

Narrative Aspects

Consequences

Somewhat paradoxically, even if Seamful Gameplay cannot be added to games with Ubiquitous Gameplay it can make games have Ubiquitous Gameplay when they did not otherwise.

Relations

Game Mastery Gameplay Changes Perception of Real World Phenomena

Stealth

Can Instantiate

Ubiquitous Gameplay

with ...

Can Modulate

Player-Location Proximity

Can Be Instantiated By

Can Be Modulated By

Possible Closure Effects

Potentially Conflicting With

Ubiquitous Gameplay

History

A pattern based upon the concept of using seamful design in game design, first introduced in the paper Gaming on the Edge: Using Seams in Ubicomp Games^[1].

References

1. ↑ Chalmers, M., Bell, M., Brown, B., Hall, M., Sherwood, S. & Tennen, P. (2005).Gaming on the Edge: Using Seams in Ubicomp Games. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology.

Acknowledgements

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