Investigating key structural elements in location-based mobile serious games

Abstract

Nowadays, the mobile industry is one of the most lucrative sectors with smartphone and tablet gaming growing year over year. In recent years, several commercial GPS-enabled AR location-aware mobile games have been presented that try to combine real world locations with in-game activities, such as Ingress or Geocaching. However, besides the obvious use of mobile games for entertainment purposes, games can disclose new opportunities for pedagogical activities when properly designed. Serious games use the motivational aspect of games for purposes other than entertainment. More specifically, location-based games have been used effectively in a number of domains. Location-based mobile serious games presented in the literature emphasize the interaction of players with the physical environment in a number of thematic domains such as promoting cultural heritage, place-based language learning in authentic settings, affecting human attitude and behavior towards environmental consciousness among other. However, such games pose extra challenges when it comes to game design and implementation due to the heterogeneity of technologies, scenarios and structural game elements involved. To this end, in this paper a number of location-based games developed for serious purposes presented by the research community in recent years is discussed. The aim of the article is to review such games from a structural perspective in order to put forward concepts and forms of gameplay that could facilitate the design of such games. Such an analysis has value for educational practitioners interested in implementing similar games. Furthermore, as educational practitioners are not expert game makers, game prototypes are implemented mainly with the use of authoring tools. Given that such tools are targeting generic location-based game experiences, there is a need for significant amount of research to be performed on ways that structural game elements and game mechanics can be framed within meaningful patterns and guidelines to create such type of games.