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In-Depth Information
5.2.2
Emergent Game Play
Interactive playgrounds also lend themselves well to
emergent game play
. Emergent
games have been defined by Nijholt et al. as: “
games that are not really predefined
by the designer, nor explicitly present as a game in the environment. Rather, the
environment may simply afford many kinds of playful interaction to its inhabitants
”
(Nijholt et al.
2009
). The game play and rules
emerge
from the interaction between
humans and their environment.
Because emergent games are not predefined, they do not necessarily have an
explicit goal. In such a sense, emergent gaming should be related to the more sponta-
neous concept of
play
. This does not mean that emergent games are entirely without
goals. Play can have many intrinsic (social, biological,
...
) goals which extend
beyond the limits of the act itself (Huizinga
1950
). Furthermore, users of emergent
systems can be challenged to form their own (short or mid term) goals through open-
ended play (Rogers and Price
2004
; Hopma et al.
2009
; Seitinger
2006
; Reidsma et al.
2012
). Morrison et al. discuss that
“a successful open-ended interactive environment
is one that promotes or requires exploratory behaviour from the participants”
. Also,
the output from the environment should arouse curiosity and require investigation to
'figure out' how it works (Morrison et al.
2011
).
An early example of emergent game play in a digitally enhanced environment is
Dancing In The Streets
(Palmer and Popat
2008
). This installation consists of a top-
down projection onto a public space that is monitored by an infra-red (IR) camera. The
IR camera detects the movement and actions of the users, which are then translated
into a visual response of the system in the projection. The projections themselves do
not have explicit goals and do not define the rules of the game. The explicit goal of
this installation is to seduce passers-by to interact with the installation in a playful
manner. However, the users can, and apparently do, create their own emergent games
through the interaction with the installation and each other.
5.2.3
Technology for Interactive Playgrounds
The technology that can be used for building interactive playgrounds is virtually
unlimited. One of the first outdoor playground implementations incorporating in-
teractive technology was the
Playware
playground. It consisted of tiles containing
sensors, LED's and/or loudspeakers, plus processing capabilities to allow one to con-
figure multiple tiles into different games (Lund et al.
2005
). The
Interactive Pathway
(see Fig.
5.1
) is a railway like construction consisting of two wooden beams with
a series of narrow pressure-sensitive mats connecting them (Seitinger et al.
2006
).
On the wooden beams, “spinning tops” were placed, hand crafted by the children
themselves. When a child steps on a mat, a motor causes one of the spinning tops to
rotate. Evaluation showed that these quite simple interactions led to a wide range of
open-ended play behaviour from the children.
