Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative and Gesture Recognition Multiplayer Smartphone Game for Tourists

In this work-in-progress paper, we present REXplorer, a mobile, location and gesture recognition based spell-casting multiplayer game for tourists. Launching in late summer 2006, this serious game will be installed as a permanent pervasive entertainment service on site the medieval city core of Germany's best preserved historic city, Regensburg. In REXplorer, visitors roleplay volunteering scientific assistants who partake in a self-guided field trip to explore odd, magical incidents occurring all across the former capital of the German Empire. Whilst it is the player’s goal to become the day’s most successful assistant (and thus, the most notable mage) by gesturing proper location-based spells with a rental smartphone, as game design researchers, it is our goal to bring to light legend and history of Regensburg by the way of novel gameplay.