Gamifying Intelligent Daily Environments through Introducing Fictionality

Abstract

A virtual form is an abstraction that enhances existing products and services by adding a layer to virtualize them. From a technical point of view, the current information technologies already make it possible to develop a virtual form using various techniques that represent information such as augmented reality technologies or ubiquitous display technologies. The virtual form can return a immediate feedback to a user so that it becomes a good design tool to develop games deployed in public spaces.We believe that incorporating fictional stories into virtual forms offers a new possibility for gamifying and enriching user experiences. However, only technological approaches cannot offer an ideal solution to develop attractive products and services if people do not feel values on them, and the design patterns for virtual forms is not well defined, especially, when a fictionality is incorporated. The design patterns needs to take into account a semiotic aspect of a virtual form. One key factor, in particular, is how strongly we believe in the reality of a fictional story within the virtual form from the semiotic aspect. This paper proposes some design patterns to integrate fictional stories into the real world for gamifying intelligent daily environments. The proposed design patterns cover three aspects. The first aspect is to exploit visual reality. The second aspect is to exploit ideological messages in fictional stories. The third aspect is to compose multiple fictional stories. The paper also shows a case study to motivate and gamify to join the Haiku contest by increasing the awareness of the importance of the contest, and show the effectiveness of the proposed design patterns.activities. Disneyland is a typical, and the most famous, theme park. Many Disney characters appear at Disneyland. Each attraction at the park is immersively constructed based on a Disney story. Because those stories are very popular, when we are at Disneyland we feel that its characters exist in the real world, that we can meet those characters and that we can enjoy being with them during our visit [13]. At carnivals, fictional stories are also key to enhancing user experiences. Fictional stories also could potentially enrich user experiences during travel, at museums, and in advertisements. Although fictional stories are good tools for enriching users' experiences with products and services, those users need to feel that the objects, characters and events that appear in the stories-but do not exist in the real world-are still realistic.Seichi Junrei is a typical geek culture activity in Japan, particularly related to Japanese animation, manga (comic) and games, in which people visit a local region from animation, manga and games. "Seichi" means "Holy Land", "Junrei" means "Pilgrimage". Typical animation fans in Japan arrive at a specific location in the local regions, and take pictures with the same screen/angle as it appears in the animation and upload them to their blogs. The most important aspect of Seichi Junrei is that something is b...

Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design

“…Several authors have suggested that adding (fictional) stories to a design is an important dimension of gameful or playful design to drive engagement (Dickey 2006;Reeves and Read 2009;Langer et al 2013;Sakamoto and Nakajima 2014). One relatively common genre are tourism-focused mixed reality applications like REXplorer (Ballagas et al 2008)o rVoices of Oakland (Dow et al 2005).…”