Evaluation strategies for pervasive games

This book focuses on evaluating pervasive games. Therefore analyzing theeffectiveness and appropriateness of traditional human computer interactionmethods to evaluate design interactions and user experience in the contextof pervasive games are the topic of this book. Specifically here the focus willbe on supporting a human-centered iterative design process with formativeevaluations of pervasive games which are intended to shape and improvedesigns. Pervasive games are played in the real world so traditionally theevaluation takes place in the field. Thus we will first focus on the examinationof methods including product-interactive focus groups and analysis of interviewsas well as video recordings using grounded theory. But evaluation inthe field is not always appropriate. Therefore afterwards we simulate theexperience of playing in a city while being in a laboratory. This includesdeveloping a game simulator for the pervasive game REXplorer. Putting thesemethods to practice by evaluating and improving REXplorer we enable themain contribution of this book-a comparison between field evaluations andlaboratory experiments for pervasive games.