REXplorer is an interactive mobile & cross-media adventure game for tourists; players control the game with a location tracking 'Wiimote'-like device, making the visitor sightseeing experience fun, highly engaging and educational:
REXplorer is a mobile, "pervasive", and persuasive game service that helps tourists and visitors to explore the history of the UNESCO world heritage city of Regensburg, Germany, and magically interact with the city's monuments instead of just seeing them.
For getting a better feeling for the game, please watch the gameplay trailer!
Gameplay
In the game, tourists roleplay scientific assistants who help a certain Professor Rex - who they meet in an introductory tutorial movie shown at the tourist info - to understand and research Regensburg's "perpetual magic".
This magic manifests itself by the way of historically & mythologically based spirits which are stationed at points of interest throughout the mostly gothic and Romanesque city core.
For their magical field research, players rent a special “paranormal activity detector” (a device composed of a mobile phone and a GPS receiver in a protective shell) to interact with these location based and site specific spirits. Along with the detector, players receive a print brochure in which the game functionality is explained and which shows a map with the magical sights.
A novel mobile interaction mechanism of “casting a spell” (making a gesture by waving the wand-like detector through the air) allows players to awaken and communicate with these spirits.
Prof. Rex has discovered five different spells, which are part of a secret language engraved onto a real flagstone in the Regensburg cathedral: Water, Air, Earth, Fire, and a vertical mark strangely reminding Prof. Rex of an "i" as in "information".
At each spirit, and with the correct spell, players can receive and resolve multiple quests; thus, these quests take players across the city, from sight to sight and from character to character.
Through the detector, spirits tell the player their story, and the story of the sight they reside at; when offering a quest to another sight / character, spirits verbally hint at the spell the player should carry out in order to accept the quest. For example: "Would you please take the fire of my love to my wife?" is a relatively blatant innuendo for the "Fire" spell.
Each character encounter is thus a both a puzzle and a help situation for the player.
The more quests a player completes, and the more spells a players successfully casts, the more points she receives, climbing a scientific assistant ranking from rookie to master assistant. In parallel, the more quests the player completes, the more the player learns about the city's multi layered history.
The detector - who accompanies the player and comments the gameplay ironically - asks players to take geo tagged pictures of their experience, which are being uploaded automatically to each player's playblog, displaying the player's route through the city, her stops, her image material, and deepening links.
The player weblog serves as a reward, a lasting diary, and a springboard for further information about the city's history.
The game serves our research groups as a continuous project focusing on pervasive & mobile game design, place-making, urban computing / interactive architecture, and influencing, steering, as well as enriching the mobile experience. So far, a couple of hundred players have enjoyed REXplorer, and some major German media have reported about the game (filed under Media coverage in the below).
Walz, Steffen P. (2007): „Pervasive Persuasive Play: Rhetorical Game Design for the Ubicomp World.“ In: Fogg, B.J. and Dean Eckles / Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab (eds.): Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Captology Media. pp. 101-108.
Ballagas, Rafael and Steffen P. Walz (2007): „REXplorer: Using Player-Centered Iterative Design Techniques for Pervasive Game Development.“ In: Magerkurth, Carsten and Carsten Röcker (eds.): Pervasive Gaming Applications – A Reader for Pervasive Gaming Research vol. 2. Aachen: Shaker. pp. 255-284. (1.9MB)
Ballagas, Rafael and Steffen P. Walz (2007): "REXplorer: A Pervasive Game for Tourists." In: Borries, Friedrich von, Walz, Steffen P. and Matthias Böttger (eds.) (2007): Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Basel / Boston / Berlin: Birkhäuser Publishing. (124KB)
Conference proceedings
Ballagas, Rafael, Kuntze, André and Steffen P. Walz (2008): „Gaming Tourism: Lessons from Evaluating REXplorer, a Pervasive Game for Tourists." In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing. Berlin: Springer LNCS. [in print]
Walz, Steffen P. and Rafael Ballagas (2007): „Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists." In: Proceedings of Situated Play. DiGRA 2007 - The 3rd International Digital Games Research Conference, Tokyo, September 24-28, 2007. pp. 489-497. (160KB)
Ballagas, Rafael, Walz, Steffen P., Kratz, Sven, Fuhr, Claudia, Yu, Eugen, Tann, Martin, Borchers, Jan, and Ludger Hovestadt (2007): „REXplorer: A Mobile, Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists." In: CHI '07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, CA, USA, 2007. New York: ACM Press.
Walz, Steffen P., Ballagas, Rafael, Borchers, Jan, Mendoza, Joel, Kratz, Sven, Wartmann, Christoph, Hameed, Bilal, and Laszlo Bardos (2006): „Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative Gesture Recognition Smartphone Game for Tourists." In: Proceedings of PerGames 2006, held in conjunction with the 4th Intl. Conference on Pervasive Computing, Dublin, 7 May 06. Berlin: Springer LNCS. (80KB)
Ballagas, Rafael, Walz, Steffen P., and Jan Borchers (2006): „REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software." Position paper submitted to the CHI 2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software, Montréal, Canada, April. Available Online at http://media.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/materials/publications/ballagas2006a.pdf.
Walz, Steffen P. (2006): „A Spatio-Ludic Rhetoric: Serious Pervasive Game Design for Sentient Architectures". In: Proceedings of game set and match II. International Conference 2006 on Computer Games, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies, TU Delft. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. pp. 50-56.
Dr. Julien Biere & Brigitte Weidmann (REX): Co-Production
Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt (ETH Zurich) & Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers (RWTH Aachen): Project Enabling, Supervision
For a complete credit list, please watch our trailer!
Inquiries
For inquiries concerning REXplorer, please E-Mail Steffen P. Walz: walz_at_arch_dot_ethz_dot_ch.
Press kit
The press kit (14MB) contains logos of all project partners, photos as well as the brochure front & back in hi res versions. Photos are (c) 2007 Alexander Möhnle. Here are more hi res press images (8MB).
This is the REXplorer project website at the new ETH CAAD wiki. For basic information about the game in German language, please visit the old German language wiki website.
