A narrative architecture for story-driven location-based mobile games

Abstract

Dramatic improvements in smartphones over the last few years have positioned them as a major platform for interactive media content. In addition to being much more portable than laptop computers, smartphones also support a sophisticated combination of GPS, sensors and communications interfaces that allow extracting context information related to their environment, such as location, orientation and weather data. This combination of mobility and context-sensitivity opens up interesting possibilities in relation to interactive narrative, and for example allows audience immersion into an interactive story to be improved by placing the content in physical locations that are of direct relevance to the story. In this paper, we present a general-purpose narrative architecture that allows a considerable range of story-based game and guide content to be expressed in location-aware manner. We also present a case study of an actual location-aware augmented reality game, which demonstrates the architecture in a commercial setting and shows that it is sufficiently lightweight to run on the current generation of smartphones. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.