What Are You Doing And Feeling Right Now?

Sammanfattning: Understanding and capturing game play experiences of players have been of great interest for some time, both in academia and industry. Methods used for eliciting game play experiences have involved the use of observations, biometric data and post-game techniques such as surveys and interviews. This is true for games that are played in fixed settings, such as computer or video games. Pervasive games however, provide a greater challenge for evaluation, as they are games that typically engage players in outdoor environments, which might mean constant movement and a great deal of the players' motor skills engaged for several hours or days. In this project I explored a new method for eliciting different aspects of the game play experience of pervasive game players, specifically focusing on motional states and different qualities of immersion. I have centered this work on self-reporting as a means for reporting these aspects of the game play experiences. However, this required an approach to selfreporting as non-obtrusive, not taking too much of the players’ attention from the game activities as well as provide ease of use. To understand the challenges in introducing a new method into a gaming experience, I focused my research on understanding experience, which is a subjective concept. Even though there are methods aiming at capturing the physiological changes during game play, they don’t capture players’ interpretations of the gaming situation. By combining this with objective measurements, I was able to gain a comprehensive understanding of the context of use. The resulting designs were two tools, iteratively developed and pre-tested in a tabletop role-playing session before a test run in the pervasive game Interference. From my findings I was able to conclude that using self-reporting tools for players to use while playing was successful, especially as the data derived from the tools supported post-game interviews. There were however challenges regarding the design and functionality, in particular in outdoor environments, that suggests improvements, as well as considerations on the use of selfreporting as an additional method for data collection.