Pervasive Games

Today we were sent a a treasure hunt around the arts and humanities building in order to help us understand what pervasive games are. Pervasive games have been split up into four main genres, these are: Treasure hunts, Assassination games, Pervasive LARPs, ARGs.

Treasure hunts consist of hints and rewards, these work by a hint given to the player such as a riddle or map which the player must figure out. Once the player has worked out the hint and moved to the next location the could find either another hint which will tell them to go to another location or a reward for working out the hint.

The rules for assassination games can be found in the book Killer: The Game of Assassination written by Steve Jackson.

Pervasive LARPs (Live Action Role Play) first started to appear around the 1980's, taking part in a LARP will have people playing a certain character and acting as they would. In more recent times LARPs have been heavily fantasy based with people having medieval wars between different races such as elves, goblins and humans.

ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) are more collaborative rather than competitive meaning that people will work together to 'beat' the game rather than against each other. ARGs are like treasure hunts in the way that they cause the players to solve puzzles in order to advance. An ARG that was very popular was the 'I Love Bees' ARG which was used in the promotion of Halo 2.

After we went on the treasure hunt we watched a movie based on a pervasive game, this movie was La Decima Vittima ( The Tenth Victim). This movie was the cause of the assassination game 'Killer' that swept over university campus' all over the United States.