An Analytical Framework for Pervasive Games in the Cultural Sector: Expanding the Boundaries of Play in 8 Dimensions

Pervasive games have the particularity of using Information Technologies to blur the boundaries between a game experience and the “ordinary” world, thus blending the game world into the player’s everyday life. In the cultural sector, they have been used to promote cultural practices or events, and to provide enhanced ways to visit cultural sites. Pervasive Games are complex objects and their production requires the work of an interdisciplinary team (e.g. game designers, developers, artists, instructional designers, and experts) composed of specialists and non-specialists of games. Our aim is to build methodological tools, such as a design framework, to help team members (a) describe and analyse pervasive games while considering the wide variety and heterogeneity of media productions used in that particular type of games; and (b) explore the specificities of pervasive games in terms of narration, structure, and usage of IT to blur the boundaries between the game world and the “ordinary” world. To build our framework, we analysed 47 pervasive games in the cultural sector. We identified dimensions that convey extensions of the boundaries of pervasive games beyond the three elementary dimensions (social, spatial, and temporal). We discuss further perspectives of this work, such as the extension of the framework and its evaluation.