Yellow is Mine!: Designing Interactive Playgrounds Based on Traditional Childrens Play - Entertaining the Whole World - page 62

many aspects of their development, such as social skills, problem solving, creativity,
and a better understanding of the physical world (Rogers ans Price 2004 ; Bekker et
al. 2008 ).
Although it is clear in principle that interactive technology can be used to facilitate
emergent games and play, it remains challenging to design them in such a way as to
actively leverage the open ended aspects that are so obviously present in traditional
playground play. This chapter presents a design method for developing interactive
playgrounds that should combine the interactivity of modern computer games and the
open-endedness of traditional outdoor play, by systematically basing the design of
these playgrounds on elements of traditional children's play. In addition, we present
a playground that we implemented using this method, focused on social and physical
activation of the children playing in it.

5.2 Interactive Playgrounds: Environments for Pervasive

and Emergent Game Play

As Seitinger et al. wrote, “the increasing availability of technologies for outdoor
interaction” would cause “digitally enhanced equipment to be incorporated into
playgrounds in the near future” (Seitinger et al. 2006 ). This vision has become
reality in numerous interactive playgrounds in different (research) projects. In this
section, we discuss a few aspects of interactive playgrounds that are central to our
own work.

5.2.1 Pervasive Gaming

Interactive playgrounds are typically pervasive gaming environments: “an emerg-
ing genre in which traditional, real-world games are augmented with computing
functionality, or, depending on the perspective, purely virtual computer entertain-
ment is brought back to the real world” (Magerkurth et al. 2005 ). Pervasive gaming
inherently involves interaction with and within the physical (real world) environment.
For example, in Camelot (Verhaegh et al. 2006 ), players collect virtual resources
in various parts of the play space to earn physical building blocks to build a castle.
In Save the safe (Soute et al. 2009 ), guards and burglars each try to get hold of a
(virtual) key that unlocks a safe. Players wear a belt with a wireless communication
unit, a vibration motor and some LED's. The virtual key is transferred from player
to player by approaching within a certain distance; key possession is indicated by
vibration of the belt. As Soute and Markopoulos noted, pervasive games should make
minimal use of hand-held displays, as such devices do not go together with wildly
running around; hence, they call this type of game Head Up Games (HUGs) (Soute
and Markopoulos 2007 ; Soute et al. 2009 ).