Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η μελέτη, ανάπτυξη και αξιολόγηση συνεργατικών εφαρμογών σε φορητές συσκευές. Για την μελέτη αυτή, αναπτύχθηκε ένα παιχνίδι διάχυτου υπολογισμού, το οποίο υποστηρίζει την χρήση του από πολλούς παίκτες ταυτόχρονα και μπορεί να παιχτεί παράλληλα σε διαφορετικές πόλεις από διαφορετικές ομάδες παικτών. Το παιχνίδι αυτό ανήκει σε ένα αναδυόμενο είδος παιχνιδιών που αναμιγνύουν την πραγματικότητα με τον εικονικό ψηφιακό κόσμο, χρησιμοποιώντας τον πραγματικό χώρο σαν το περιβάλλον του παιχνιδιού. Το παιχνίδι που αναπτύχθηκε εδώ χρησιμοποιεί σαν βασικά στοιχεία την μπλόφα, την παραπλάνηση και την ανάθεση ρόλων. Για την ανάπτυξή του ακολουθήθηκε ένα επαναληπτικό μοντέλο σχεδιασμού με την αξιολόγηση να παίρνει μέρος με διάφορες τεχνικές και μεθόδους στα διάφορα στάδια ανάπτυξης. Η υλοποίηση πραγματοποιήθηκε για κινητά τηλέφωνα με λειτουργικό σύστημα Android, μια επίσης καινούργια πλατφόρμα για φορητές συσκευές από την Google και την OHA. / The aim of this project is the design, development and evaluation of collaborative applications on mobile devices. For this study, a pervasive game was developed, which supports the use of it by many players simultaneously and can be played simultaneously in different cities by different groups of players. This game belongs to an emerging genre that mixes reality with the virtual digital world, using the real space as the gaming environment. The game was developed here uses the main elements of the bluff, deception and the assignment of roles. For its development an iterative design model was followed. The evaluation phase took place with various techniques and methods in different stages of development. The implementation was made for mobile phones running Android, also a new platform for mobile devices from Google and the OHA.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking'. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man's journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando's most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. "The art of cruising" city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando's car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid "techno-scapes" overlaying "the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical" (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando's car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando's "technoscape" through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and "ways of seeing" across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. 'In Irish culture, "quare" can mean "very" or "extremely" or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word "queer." Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term "quare" versus "queer." Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for "quareness" as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, "quareness" has an important critical application for considering how Orlando's urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed.