Location-based games Course

This is a 3- hours hands on course on designing location-based games. The instructors are Christos Sintoris, Nikoleta Yiannoutsou and Nikolaos Avouris of the University of Patras HCI Group.

The objective of this course, is to introduce the participants to location-based games and to the challenges relating to designing them. Key characteristics of this new genre are introduced first, followed by a design framework and a set of design guidelines. Examples of location-based games will be presented and typical design patterns as extracted from previous workshops will be discussed. This course has already been run in the frame of several conferences and summer schools (Sintoris, 2014). Typical course participants include interaction designers, game designers and developers, practitioners and researchers interested in location-based games. The course is presented by researchers who have been involved in designing and studying human interaction with location-based games for many years. Examples of games developed by the course organizers include MuseumScrabble, RebelsVsSpies, Taggling, etc. The course is structured as following: (a) key concepts and definitions (b)examples, (b) positioning technologies, (c) designing location-based games, (d) design guidelines, (e) hands-on experience: design of a game. The latest edition of the course was in the context of Interact 2017 in Mumbai, India.