Codename Heroes - Designing for experience in public places in a long term pervasive game

Codename Heroes is a persistent, multiplayer, crowd-sourced pervasive game that uses Bluetooth, GPS and the phone camera. It plays in the world around you and is always active. Players take the roles of secret superheroes, fighting for their rights and their beliefs. The game also makes use of physical objects and places in the environment. The game targets teenagers with a specific focus on young women. The purpose of the game is to engage and empower players. The design is informed by ethnographic studies of young women as well as by gender studies. The goal is to create an incitement for young people to appropriate spaces they do not usually move in, and try things they would not otherwise do. Codename Heroes is part of a project investigating pervasive games, games that are played in the physical world with the aid of mobile technology. The current research is focused at exploring large scale, long term, non-location-specific pervasive games, while still keeping the physical aspect of game-specific objects, to understand how this physicality affects the experience of the game.