Evaluation of Pervasive Games: Recruitment of Qualified Participants through Preparatory Game Phases
This addresses the challenge of participant recruitment for pervasive game researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for user trials.
The study examined whether a preparatory game phase could effectively recruit suitable participants for pervasive game research, finding that game awareness from the preliminary phase helped identify qualified subjects for user trials.
In this paper we present the evaluation process for Barbarossa, a pervasive role playing game. Barbarossa involves an invitational (preparatory) and a main execution phase. The former is freely available though Google Play store and may be played anytime/ anywhere. The latter defines three inter-dependent player roles acted by players who need to collaborate in a treasure hunting game. The eligibility of players for participating in the main game phase is restricted among those ranked relatively high in the invitational phase. Herein, we investigate the impact of the invitational game mode on the players overall game experience. The main hypothesis tested is that game awareness (gained from participating in a preliminary game phase) may serve as a means for recruiting the most suitable subjects for user trials on pervasive game research prototypes.