Crossmedia/Space Gaming

Epidemic Menace is a pervasive crossmedia game. Crossmedia games focus on a wide variety of gaming devices including traditional media channels, game consoles as well as mobile and pervasive computing technology to allow for a broad variety of game experiences. The overall goal of the game is to prevent the virus from escaping the campus, to clear the campus from the virus instances, create an antivirus to save Prof. Ivy Miller and to find out what happened on the campus. The winner is the team that that leads the high score list.

The game consists of two competing teams and each team holds a minimum of 5 players. Each team receives at the beginning of the game: 5 smart phones (one for each player); 1 Palmpilot; 1 AR system; 5 special online accounts (one for each player). Players can change devices or play modes anytime and can play on their own if they wish but have clear advantages through collaboration.

Game Space: The game is played in a physical and a virtual game space and teams have to play in both spaces in order to extinguish the virus. The virtual game space will be a model of the physical game space and game appearance and game mechanics will be adapted in the physical and the virtual game space. For example, the virus appears differently in both spaces.

In the physical world the virus may appear as: Spatialized sound, 2D Map, based display of viruses in proximity, Overlaid 3D graphics on AR devices, And in the virtual world the virus may appear as: Sound, Animated 2D and 3D graphics.

Storyline: The Dean of the Schloss Birlinghoven medical research laboratory Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Mathiessen has been working on a epidemic prevention program called EEPA (European Epidemic Prevention Association) for years and is very close to a mayor breakthrough that would have revolutionized the virus simulation programmes used by medical institutes around the world when the most part of his work is stolen and copied by a villain. The villain uses his work to infect a defined area of the Schloss Birlinghoven complex, his motives and his approach are unknown. The situation escalates when one of the medical researchers Prof. Ivy Miller is infected by the virus and falls into a coma. The EEPA is informed and a small group of experts is send to Schloss Birlinghoven to take care of the situation. [via pasta and vinegar]