Aliens on the Bus: A family of pervasive games

There is an interesting category of digital games particularly challenging consumer electronics: pervasive games. On the one hand, pervasive games appear extremely promising for purposes such as learning and for encouraging players to engage in healthy outdoor activities. They widen the horizon of games content by direct access to reality. On the other hand, a larger number of pervasive games failed badly bearing abundant evidence for the need of better understanding the essentials of pervasive games and of the experience in playing them. The authors have developed not only a single pervasive game concept, but a whole family of concepts quite suitable for systematically challenging consumer electronics aiming at a wide spectrum of effects ranging from amusement to game-based learning.