Enabling use of context information in pervasive games (ePub)

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1.9, University of Applied Sciences Bremen (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (Focus)), course: master thesis, 38 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Pervasive games use pervasive technology to create new possibilities for entertainment in the real world. The emergence of pervasive technology created a world that is filled with ubiquitous computing devices. These devices are available everywhere, every time in the physical world. The omnipresence of computing devices brought many possibilities to design innovative games those can be played socially with the help of technology. Game designers define game rules, competitions, and goals to create a temporary social community to provide fun and entertainment. The digital world executes game rules, or game logic, according to behaviors of the game participants and the game logic reacts to the participants. Pervasive games can be designed to enable mobility, interaction in the physical world with other players, and to accomplish the game missions through the real world activities. The freedom for mobility and social interactions also bring many possibilities to enhance the overall gaming experience. Pervasive games are consisting of two different worlds; the physical world and the virtual world, or digital world, which should be coincided to play the game. The digital world contains digital devices and software components, which are responsible to execute the game mechanics. On the other hand, the physical world is the playground to play the game that consists of physical artifacts. The virtual world uses information about the physical world to execute the game mechanics. Therefore, the up-to-date information about the game entities should be provided to the virtual world to validate the information against the game rules. The information about game artifacts in pervasive games is context dependent, which is used to execute the game mechanics. The game entities, e.g., player move from on situation to another to accomplish the game missions. The virtual world checks the contextual information of the game entities to check the game rules and to react when any of the game rules matches with current contextual information of a game object, or objects. Therefore, the context data of each object should be synchronized with the game mechanics in the digital world. In pervasive game development the fundamental and primary requirement is to enable the use of contextual information.