I recently gave a lecture on pervasive games. In preparing that lecture I took some notes that were almost an introduction to the subject itself. It seemed a pity not to use that text, so here is a short introduction to pervasive gaming. Pervasive Games Pervasive games are not an entirely new phenomenon, but the research done on them is quite new. We’ll define what pervasive games are in a minute. First, lets look at an example and see if it enlightens what type of games are in question. ...

I wrote about games as art before, so I should mention that Georgia Tech University has held a conference called Art History of Games. The talks are fortunately available on Youtube. Certainly worth a glance.

I acted in Juhana Petterson’s participatory art installation, Portaikko, last weekend at Imatra Human Culture art-festival. It was exciting, since I haven’t done anything like it before, but still familiar enough from previous larp-experience. The amount of participants wasn’t spectacular, but easily enough to feel like a success.

I just played my first game of role-playing over the internet today. I’ve played IRC-based role-playing games before, but these have centered on the text; this time we used mainly voice chat. I shouldn’t be surprised in this age of technology, but I am: it was easy. We wanted to use voice chat for communication and chose Teamspeak, mostly because all of us had experience with it. Apart from some hardware problems, voice chat worked like a charm. Video chat would probably have been even better, but voice chat seems easily sufficient. ...

It seems that Roger Ebert has changed his opinion of games. The acclaimed movie critic admits that he cannot make the judgement that games are not art because he is not familiar enough with video games. But it seems that not everybody agrees that this is a good thing.

Reservoir Hounds was a success, at least with some criteria (and some post-game lie). The game ran for less than an hour, but that wasn’t surprising as I was quite sure we wouldn’t hit the two-hour time limit we had. The concept of the game was simple: Reservoir Dogs turned into jeepform (if you haven’t seen it: a bunch of gangsters arguing why a robbery went bad, and who’s to blame). We had some simple mechanics for determining when the game ended, and a rule about determining what had happened during the actual robbery part. Basically anything that the players said had happened during the robbery had happened, unless someone disagreed. The rule was: anything the players say is true is true - unless they are lying. There was no objective truth, as everything was up to debate. ...