Emergent Benefits of Ambiguous Gameplay

This project is centred around pervasive games - these are games that are designed to blur the boundaries between playing and not-playing, for example by using real-world settings, extended play sessions and actors mixed in with the general public. One aim of pervasive games is to create an engaging or "spooky" experience that is sometimes difficult to discern from real life, and the phenomenon of apophenia (where players begin to "see" a game where none exists) was the subject of the project's first paper, leading into a general interest in ambiguity and creative interpretation in games. Since creativity and ambiguity are closely linked from a cognitive psychology perspective, the project also covers games for creativity, in particular games that relied on ambiguity as a facilitator of creativity and introspective play.