Humans vs. Zombies, for instance — in which college students hunt each other around a campus — takes place in the physical world around the players, without being dependent on particular locations. One could imagine a host of other gameplay possibilities that leverage mechanics that depend on interactions with other players or with categories of objects or locations (“coffee shops,” for instance) rather than interactions with particular locations (“the Starbucks at 2nd and Market”).

With that in mind, what’s the best definition for a class of games we could call “pervasive”? Here’s my current thinking:

A pervasive game is a game that takes place in the physical world, concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives.

Let’s pick that apart a little:

• a game that takes place in the physical world
• a game that takes place concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives

Explicated below:

Pervasive games take place in the physical world
This is only to say that there must be a component of gameplay that does not take place online, nor on a game board as in a traditional board game. This could be an interaction with another person, an interaction with a particular physical object, or an interaction with a place or category of place. You may need to tag the human who’s wearing the bandana around her arm (as in Humans vs. Zombies). You may need to take a photo of a coffee cup and later upload it in order to fulfill the requirements of a mission. You may need to meet another player in a coffee shop of your choosing (rather than a particular shop dictated by the game). You may need to pass an object to another player. Etc., the point being that the gameplay requires some kind of interaction with the physical world, even if only on the honor system, as in the case of the coffee cup photo above. (This doesn’t preclude location-based experiences that require the player to be present in specific locations, but it is broad enough to take in experiences with don’t have that requirement attached, which is part of the reason I feel pervasive gaming needs its own definition.)

Pervasive games take place concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives
This is in the nature of the word “pervasive.” These games should “pervade” the life of the player — i.e., they should “be perceived in every part of” and/or “be present and apparent throughout,” as the dictionary has it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re always-on experiences. But it does mean that when they are active, they are active not in a constrained area, but throughout most or all of the activities and places of one’s day. Perhaps you don a badge or scarf during the hours you’re available for gameplay; others with the same indicator showing are valid targets / allies / etc. Or perhaps play happens from 9 to 5 in the financial district of your city; you pick out a likely-looking stranger and give him the code word — if he’s also a player and feels like participating at that moment, he gives you the right response. In any case, games and gameplay sessions do not occupy finite periods of time, but rather unfold in a continuous fashion, with the player either always being involved, or dipping in and out of the “world” of play as they would in an MMO like World of Warcraft; gameplay continues, even when a particular player is not actively involved in it.

As definitions go, this one is not too fine-grained, and could probably use some refinement. But it seems a good start, to me. Is such a definition needed? That’s a different question. But I do think it’s important to be able to talk about “pervasive games” as different from “location-based games,” since (to my eye) they entail a different set of conditions, resources, and best practices. All of which are perhaps topics for their own post(s).

All that said, I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about this, which is part of the reason I’m looking forward to reading this dissertation, from Stine Ejsing-Duun at Denmark’s Aarhus University, which appears on first glance to conflate the two terms. Doesn’t matter: as long as people are looking at, playing, and creating this kind of experience, it’s a win.

…players of the popular AdventureQuest Worlds MMORPG are being punished for dying in-game by being forced to see an advertisement for nine seconds before being allowed to return to life.

Previously, AdventureQuest Worlds players who died in-game would be faced with a grayed out screen showing their character on the ground and a nine second countdown before they could return back to life. With this new change, when a player dies, Death makes a personal appearance on the player’s screen and says a witty line while showing a static ad of an Artix Entertainment-related game or item.

“For years our players scoffed at how there was no real punishment for dying in AQWorlds,” said Adam Bohn, CEO/Founder of Artix Entertainment, LLC. “So we added a fate worse than death… ads!”

Already, AdventureQuest players are up in arms — singing exactly the tune Artix no doubt wants them to: “now when i die im threatened with ads…i rather pay 100 gold NOT to have ads when i die”

Will it work? Who knows? But it’s the most amusingly innovative instance of in-game advertising I’ve seen in some time, and exceedingly fitting, if you ask me. Great incentive to level up your game.

If you want a shirt, email your address to me at themetaverse at gmail dot com and I’ll get one off to you. The design is essentially the same as the cover of the DVD, but in green instead of red.

PK is fairly straightforward, giving you simple mobs to hunt down and resources to collect, within half a mile of your GPS-determined or tower-triangulated location, whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android handset. One note: I got the game going on my iPhone for about a day, but haven’t been able to get it launched since. According to a recent interview with the developers, however, there are about 70,000 more or less active players, which sounds fairly respectable to me, given the nature of the game.

Things get interesting when you notice that PK shows you the location of other players near you, and lets you interact with them, either in duels or by grouping up to go adventuring together. There are few ways to venture far outside your current location on the map without physically getting up and moving, but your contacts can invite you to join them at their real-life location, which is a nice touch. You seem to be able to plant a flag when you’re across town, then visit it from your home location, and you can stake a claim to real-life plots of land, which is interesting. A new version of the game (no longer free), is apparently due out very shortly.

Games like Parallel Kingdom are important, for a couple of reasons. (Here’s Wikipedia’s somewhat random list of location-based games. I’ve also been checking out Sphericle, which seems to have at least a small community of players.) Expect to see more of these kinds of games qua games, as powerful mobile devices become more widespread and people and become more accustomed to having information streamed to them on the go.

But location-based games are also going to be part of what gets people used to location-based services in general. Apps like Foursquare are already using game mechanics get people engaged, giving users points for “checking in” at the establishments they frequent. These and others are already giving us a taste of what life may be like when we’re streaming our locations to our friends all the time.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that this could well mean a return to the time when relationships with the people you actually knew and saw every day had a different status than those you just kept up with online. Needless to say, we never really left that time, but when you’re Facebook “friends” both with your significant other and with people you’ve never physically met, it begins to feel that way. Will we soon have Facebook “acquaintances” as well as friends? You can create cohorts using the broadcast and privacy tools of a service like Facebook, of course, but when those services start to offer such labels explicitly, you’ll know we’ve moved on to the next stage of their evolution.

I’ve written plenty about Eve in the past, so I won’t go into too much detail here about the game itself. What’s remarkable to me is how the game’s narrative, the “story” of one’s time in Eve, is driven more by the dynamics among players and corporations than by the mechanics of gameplay itself.

I was going to write that the narrative is driven “as much” by personal dynamics as by gameplay, but on reflection, that just isn’t true. In Eve, the game mechanics — the intricate systems of paper beating rock beating scissors beating paper — seem designed to drive people into either conflict or cooperation. You could play the game without ever interacting meaningfully with another player (this would be difficult, in fact), but it would be a boring slog. There is no “solo” game in Eve: even when you’re alone in space, the environment and the economy and almost all the other aspects of the game are affected by what other people are doing, to a much greater extent than in most other MMOs.

That’s one of the reasons that many Eve players become so strongly connected to the people they fly with in the game. The closest analogy that’s occurred to me is to a hardcore but amateur softball or soccer team. The results of your efforts are meaningful only within the confines of the softball league (its own virtual world), and yet are no less meaningful for that. And the relationships that form there are those fed by the experience of striving together for a common goal — just as they are in Eve (and many other contexts). Nearly the only difference is that softball players tend to be in the same physical place much more often than gamers. They may occasionally get more exercise as well…