Last Wednesday in our Ubicomp reading group we discussed the classic paper Pirates!

Björk, S., Falk, J., Hansson, R. and Ljungstrand, P. (2001) Pirates! -
Using the Physical World as a Game Board. Proceedings of the 8th IFIP
TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
(INTERACT). Tokyo, Japan, July 9-13.

As this paper is considered a classic in the area of ubiquitous games, we felt it would be a good paper to discuss to understand something about games in general and mobile games more specifically.

From the readings emerged a number of questions that related to this paper and the larger area of games research:

What is interesting about interacting in physical environments?
Why are games important to study?
What is it about game interactions that people are trying to understand?
Are people studying games to attempt to bring social interaction back into game play?
What is the point of physical location and how can mobile game designers effectively manage this notion of location?

Relevance:
As this paper was on of the first regarding mixed reality games research, reading and discussing it may provide insight into why people are doing mixed reality games research today and whether we should explore this avenue ourselves.