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User-Generated Content in Pervasive Games

Published: 23 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

User-generated content (UGC) is already incorporated in several computer game instances wherein the players may create, edit and release their own content to the game world, thus influencing the game's evolution as well as the experience of other players. Lately, pervasive games have emerged as an exciting new development in gaming extending the boundaries of play out in the real word. The effectiveness of pervasive games in creating immersive live-action game experiences principally depends on the correlation of the game content with actual physical elements. To address this issue, most pervasive game prototypes so far have been bound to specific locations, while game content has been manually edited by the developers; they have also been heavily dependent on the mediation of orchestration teams. Nevertheless, the capacity of pervasive games to be staged anywhere (i.e. their portability) is critical for their wider adoption and commercial success. Since the manual creation of game content is not feasible in portable games, UGC remains as the only practical option for content provision. Notably, the impact of UGC has not been studied so far in the pervasive games literature. This article introduces Barbarossa, a pervasive role-playing game based on UGC. Barbarossa serves as a testbed for investigating the effect of UGC under diverse technical, functional and game play characteristics. The user trials of Barbarossa confirmed that the effective use of UGC can enhance the quality of experience perceived by players and indirectly serve as a useful orchestration tool. We also document best practices with respect to the effective use of UGC in pervasive games, which could be useful to future developers.

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Published In

cover image Computers in Entertainment
Computers in Entertainment   Volume 16, Issue 1
Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment
Spring 2018
49 pages
EISSN:1544-3574
DOI:10.1145/3162074
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 December 2017
Accepted: 01 December 2016
Revised: 01 December 2016
Received: 01 January 2016
Published in CIE Volume 16, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Pervasive games
  2. openness
  3. orchestration
  4. portability
  5. role-playing
  6. user-generated content

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  • (2024)The Metaverse GameThe Metaverse for the Healthcare Industry10.1007/978-3-031-60073-9_12(241-256)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Design Principles for Content Creation in Location-Based GamesACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/358368919:5s(1-30)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Importance of Democratization for Virtual Reality in Education2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00118(536-540)Online publication date: Mar-2023
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  • (2022)User-Generated Content and Editors in Video Games: Survey and Vision2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG51982.2022.9893717(536-543)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Building blocks for creating enjoyable games—A systematic literature reviewInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102758159:COnline publication date: 30-Dec-2021

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