Pervasive Games: Theory and Design

We have studied pervasive games for a number of years now. Our paths crossed during IPerG, an EU funded project that ended in 2008. Since then we (that’s Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola and Annika Waern) and our many contributors have worked to package what we learned into a definitive book. This has taken close to two years, but now that work is almost done. We have finally submitted the manuscript to the published. “Pervasive Games: Theory and Design” is coming out from Elsevier later this year.

It has been an extremely interesting journey. We have had the opportunity to dwell into some of the most interesting games of the last decade (such as The Beast, Momentum and Mystery of Fifth Avenue), to discover weird and wonderful neighboring phenomena and predecessors of pervasive games (guerrilla gardening, Happenings, parkour), to work and correspond with many of the key players in this field, to try and create a theoretical and design-oriented way of understanding these activities – and to play many of these games.

Now that the book is finished we decided to start a blog. There is a ton of material that couldn’t fit between the covers of “Pervasive Games” and we suspect that there will be interesting development forth mentioning before the book is out. We need a place where we can dig into all that – and this blog is it. If the blog also helps sell a copy or two of the book as well, we don’t mind.

Banner image courtesy and copyright (c) Blast Theory.