Evaluation strategies for pervasive games

This book focuses on evaluating pervasive games. Therefore analyzing the effectiveness and appropriateness of traditional human computer interaction methods to evaluate design, interactions, and user experience in the context of pervasive games are the topic of this book. Specifically here, the focus will be on supporting a human-centered iterative design process with formative evaluations of pervasive games, which are intended to shape and improve designs. Pervasive games are played in the real world, so traditionally the evaluation takes place in the field. Thus we will first focus on the examination of methods including product-interactive focus groups and analysis of interviews as well as video recordings using grounded theory. But evaluation in the field is not always appropriate. Therefore afterwards we simulate the experience of playing in a city while being in a laboratory. This includes developing a game simulator for the pervasive game REXplorer. Putting these methods to practice by evaluating and improving REXplorer, we enable the main contribution of this book-a comparison between field evaluations and laboratory experiments for pervasive games.