SPLASH: Perspectives on Mobile Socializing, Playing and Content Sharing

Social computing applications have empowered users to create and share content. Users are able to share rich location-based multimedia information by harnessing the phone capabilities such as Global Positioning Systems and wireless networking. An emerging line of inquiry has focused on the blending of social computing features with mobile gaming. In this paper, we introduce SPLASH(Socializing, Playing, Sharing), a multiplayer, pervasive social gaming and content sharing application. SPLASH users are able to share location-based content, play games and, at the same time, interact with other users in a virtual extension of a physical space. SPLASH was evaluated in two focus groups to elicit users´perspectives on the concepts of socializing, playing and sharing on the mobile platform. Our finding suggests that the participants were attracted to the novelty of the application, but felt that there were some improvements that could be done. Implications related to the game design drawn from the evaluation are discussed.