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| Zachary O. Toups, Andruid Kerne, Daniel Caruso, Erin Devoy, Ross Graeber, Kyle Overby |
Rogue Signals is a location-aware game designed to study the effects of information scarcity and tight communication channels on teams engaged in distributed cooperative activity. Our goal is to promote team cognition through serious gaming.
In Rogue Signals, players move and search in the real world, while avoiding predators lurking in a virtual overlay. Players' actions are translated into virtual coordinates that indicate the location of a player's avatar.
Information is scarce: one player on the human team, the coordinator, sits at a computer terminal and can see the virtual world, including the locations of any objectives the others need to find, but is unable to see the real world. The other three players, the harvesters, search the real world for the hidden objectives (represented by bar-coded objects) while avoiding predators that they cannot see. Players must communicate via radio to form a collective understanding of their environment and team status.