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Where is the answer?: the importance of curiosity in pervasive mobile games

Today games are increasingly recognized not only for their entertainment value, but also for their positive impact on social interaction, educational potential, technical interests, publicity and economical power. A new game genre of pervasive games extends a virtual game world into the real world environment, allowing players to move seamlessly from one to the other. Our research is focused on identifying the elements that are important in a pervasive playful application that can trigger the interest of different individuals towards the reflection and understanding of the knowledge surrounding them. Our findings suggest that stimulating the curiosity of players is one of these key elements, and that it should be considered in the design of serious mobile games with pervasive characteristics, while looking to enrich the informal learning. In addition, mobile phones are well accepted as play tools. These results are based on the feedback given by 45 players of our game entitled SciMyst, which is a mobile adventure game with pervasive and multiplayer characteristics. In SciMyst the player has to solve different types of enigmas, which are based on the information from the real world. The player is required to become familiar with the surroundings in order to succeed, and at the same time s/he is learning from the environment in a playful manner. The game was in action and the data collection took place during SciFest 2007, a science festival in Joensuu, Finland, in March 2007.