• Corpus ID: 16909696

Vegame: Exploring Art and History in Venice Game Architecture

@inproceedings{FrancescoVegameEA,
  title={Vegame: Exploring Art and History in Venice Game Architecture},
  author={Francesco and Bellotti and Riccardo and Berta and Alessandro and De Gloria and Edmondo and Ferretti and Massimiliano and Margarone}
}

• Francesco, Bellotti, +7 authors Margarone
• Computer Science

M obile computing technologies can support users in performing the activities of daily life 1 and enhance their interaction with the surrounding environment. But evaluating ubiquitous computing systems and their impact on a target population is difficult and costly because it requires analyzing real users—using a fully operational, reliable , and robust tool—in a real context. 2 Our pro-ject's aim was thus to develop a mobile game and test its effectiveness in a real-world setting, at reasonable costs, using available technology. The Venice Game project explores how mobile gaming 3 can help users enhance their experience of art and history through a pleasant and challenging interaction with the heritage and people in an urban environment. VeGame's participants form teams and play along Venice's narrow streets, discovering the city's art and history. VeGame exemplifies a new game type that uses wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies to create a transparent linkage between the physical world and Web resources. VeGame's pedagogical methods rely mostly on constructivist learning philosophies, 4 which emphasize interacting socially and with the physical environment as fundamental elements for developing cognitive activity. Relying on such principles, we have designed a game structure that closely resembles a treasure hunt and that targets students aged 15 to 20. However, by striving to minimize usability barriers, we intend the game for general public use as well, particularly by tourists. VeGame groups players into teams. Several teams can play the game simultaneously—during special events or on field trips, for example—or any tourist who wants to explore Venice can play it independently. The game challenges players and stimulates competition by assigning scores that reward a player's activity. It also maintains session standings for special events and has a " hall of fame " that records all participants' scores. The participating teams each use a pocket PC loaded with VeGame's software, as Figure 1a shows. The game invites players to go through a sequence of stages that showcase points of inter-est—churches, palaces, and squares—distributed throughout the city, as the map in Figure 1b shows. Figure 1c shows that, at each stage, the game presents the player with a stage menu, which leads to the five trials, or microgames, available at that stage: HistoricalQuiz, VisualQuiz, RightPlace, Couples, and VideoGame. The microgames form instances of 13 typologies, which the VeGame Web site 5 describes in detail. Game types We divide microgames into three broad categories , according to …