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Children's outdoor play is fluent and fluctuating, shaped by environmental features and conditions. The article reports on a project where interaction designers and landscape architects work together to fuse their knowledge into working solutions for integrating interactive play in outdoor environments. We report on a schoolyard trial, where interactive play technology was installed as an integral part of a schoolyard environment, and discuss the interplay between technology and the environment that was partly natural forest and partly constructed playground. We highlight in particular the importance of the adaptability of the natural environment, how the combination of interactive technology and natural environment can contribute to the versatility of play activities, and how the interactive technology can both be useful for presenting invitations to play in such adaptable places, and enhance the adaptability for play in otherwise impoverished places.

In this paper the design, implementation and testing of the Location-Based game Passing On is explored. It is a multi-player game for mobile phones, with a focus on asymmetric and limited communication. While one player can communicate by talking, the other can answer only by knocking. This limited and asymmetric communication became one of the central gameplay resources in the game, shaping much of the experience for the players.

Using observations and interviews, the knocking and the experience it created is analyzed and discussed. It is shown how this made the game emphasize social interaction, moving the focus from the phone to the environment, and how the knocking helped create a sense of presence for the player feeling them.

Gender-aware design is important in computer games in general, and perhaps even more so in the design of pervasive games, as these are played in the ordinary world. As pervasive games blur the distinction between game and non-game situations, they influence the everyday lives of their players.

We discuss the design process for the game ‘Codename Heroes’ from a gender-aware perspective. The focus is on how players reacted to the experience of playing the game during a sequence of design workshops. We found that playing the game made people less sensitive to ‘fear of the outside’. The participants were aware they ‘should’ feel unsafe in unknown neighbourhoods, but mostly did not. Furthermore, a combination of collaboration with internal competition fostered a sense of empowerment. Finally, we could confirm what previous researchers have seen, that women participants tended to blame themselves, rather than the technology or the situation, for errors.