Survey of Pervasive Games and Technologies

Abstract

The survey in this chapter, aims to be a systematic review of existing pervasive games and their technologies. The survey spans: two large collaborations that together span 10 years, two books pertaining to pervasive games, and, top ranking keyword search results, on Google Scholar, after the year 2009. Complementary searches were performed to find references, citing previously found references, that were considered key to the study or relevant to the definition of pervasive games. A total of 59 pervasive games/projects and 27 technologies were surveyed, simultaneously uncovering related work. Ten games/projects are reported on in detail from a cultural perspective, introducing games from a cultural perspective and any technologies that were used. As a conclusion, a component features set, considered central to supporting pervasive games is distilled and the ten games are discussed again, but from a technological perspective, in relation to the different component features. Related work relative to the component feature set is discussed. And, the component feature set is verified against the definitions of pervasive games.