On Monday, March 11th 2013, Olga Yanenko, member of the Geogames team, is giving a presentation about Geogames at the University of Southern California Spatial Sciences Institute. This visit also involves a test run of the Neocartographer game with USC GeoDesign students.
Christoph Schlieder & Olga Yanenko:
Location-based Games in Education and TourismAbstract. Location-based games introduce an element that is missing in interactive console games, namely locomotion in outdoor environments such as an urban neighborhood or a natural park. These games are particularly interesting for educational projects with school children because they not only connect the players socially but also connect them with the geographic environment. Most location-based games use GPS as positioning technology and let the players communicate with mobile handheld devices such as smartphones. The talk concentrates on this type of games, especially on game designs that combine strategic reasoning with sportive types of locomotion. Research issues are illustrated with case studies from educational and touristic applications. The game relocation problem is presented as a major challenge. It arises from the fact that a location-based game design exploits specific features of the geographic environment. Relocating the game to a different environment therefore involves more or less complex spatial analysis, for instance, of pedestrian paths between points of interest.
Visit the USC homepage for more details. The talk is also available online.
