A method to assess pervasive qualities in mobile games

摘要

Software designers are facing huge challenges imposed by a new generation of applications that mix real and digital worlds, such as pervasive games. This type of game has recently become a worldwide phenomenon, with thousands of people walking in the streets with smartphones to interact with the physical environment. In this paper, we propose a new method to assess pervasive qualities in pervasive mobile games, which can be customized and extended to other ubiquitous applications. This method generates a quality report, which consists of a quality spreadsheet (containing metric values and comments) and a quality vector (representing the game quality profile in the form of a bar chart). In addition, we can compare quality vectors using similarity criteria. In this paper, we apply the proposed method to commercial and academic prototype games to shed more light on their pervasive characteristics and identify ways to improve the overall quality that sets these games apart from traditional digital games—that is, pervasiveness.