Chasing the Fugitive on Campus: Designing a Location-based Game for Collaborative Play

We report on our experiences with building and deploying a collaborative location-based mobile game. The Fugitive is a multiplayer game that is played using mobile TabletPCs in a natural campus environment. The objective is to track and capture a hidden object called the Fugitive on a digital campus map using annotations for communication among one's teammates. We discuss the design, development, and network infrastructure as well as focus group and observational findings from our field study. Our findings suggest that the effect of location-awareness on collaboration and game play strategies is an intriguing area for study, and we share our insights from this project with the Canadian Game Studies community.