Combining Web, Mobile Phones and Public Displays in Large-Scale: Manhattan Story Mashup

The analysis shows how the game succeeds in fostering players' creativity by exploiting ambiguity and how the players were engaged in a fast-paced competition which resulted in 115 stories and 3142 photos in 1.5 hours.

Abstract

We present a large-scale pervasive game called Manhattan Story Mashup that combines the Web, camera phones, and a large public display. The game introduces a new form of interactive storytelling which lets an unlimited number of players author stories in the Web while a large number of players illustrate the stories with camera phones. This paper presents the first deployment of the game and a detailed analysis of its quantitative and qualitative results. We present details on the game implementation and game set up including practical lessons learnt about this large-scale experiment involving over 300 players in total. The analysis shows how the game succeeds in fostering players' creativity by exploiting ambiguity and how the players were engaged in a fast-paced competition which resulted in 115 stories and 3142 photos in 1.5 hours.