Trendsurfing: Urban gaming (The Times)
By David Rowan
Dice games and computer consoles have their charms. But how about using an entire city as one gigantic game board? Over the past year or two, cityscapes from Bristol to Brooklyn have become vast unofficial playgrounds for a series of imaginative outdoor challenges. Some of these games use the city grid for playing Pac-Man, the Eighties video game, on a human scale; others reward the first person to solve a trail of location-based clues. What they have in common is an urge to combine zippy new technologies with real-life social interaction.
The phenomenon has picked up the label "urban gaming", although you will also hear it called "location-based gaming" or "outdoor mixed-reality gaming". At first, the creative drive came from academics and artists, but corporate marketing departments are now sponsoring what they hope will be the next buzz on the streets.
Hasbro used an urban game last month to promote a new version of Monopoly, wherein the rent payments on players’ houses and hotels were determined by the movements of 18 London taxis, tracked over the internet via GPS. In the US in spring, phone company Qwest organised a series of ConQwest tournaments, in which school teams competed to find special bar codes hidden around various cities.
Mostly, these games reward problem-solving and thinking on the run; clues are provided via wireless iPaq connections or SMS messages containing GPS coordinates. Sometimes, though, the goal is simply old-fashioned fun. Why else would groups of strangers run around New York playing the roles of Inky, Blinky and the other characters from Pac-Man? Last year, the streets around Washington Square Park formed the grid for PacManhattan, in which one player ran around collecting virtual "dots" while avoiding being eaten by the nasty ghosts. The game, developed at New York University, used mobile phones and wireless internet connections to track players’ movements and broadcast them to a wider audience over the net. Later this year, a National University of Singapore team plan to take the game to the next level, using virtual-reality headsets and goggles so players can see where they are in the grid. Alas, rather than actually eat one another, they merely have to tap each other’s shoulders.
Urban gaming may be a global trend, but a British team of artists can claim credit for popularising it. Blast Theory, based in East London, is behind a series of games that have used 3G phones and webcams to locate players within real-life environments. In one such game, Uncle Roy All Around You, street players in London and West Bromwich, carrying handheld computers, worked with online participants to find postcards hidden around the city and, eventually, the elusive Uncle Roy. Another, I Like Frank, took over the streets of Adelaide. Whether playing on the ground or logging in from around the world, participants, as the artists saw it, were "testing the possibilities of a new hybrid space".
That may over-intellectualise what has fast become an energetic alternative to passive entertainment, in keeping with mobile clubbing, iPod parties and some of the other social-networking trends explored in this slot. Plus, it has one killer advantage over the Xbox: it gets you out of the house ...
(The Times Magazine, July 23 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
Dice games and computer consoles have their charms. But how about using an entire city as one gigantic game board? Over the past year or two, cityscapes from Bristol to Brooklyn have become vast unofficial playgrounds for a series of imaginative outdoor challenges. Some of these games use the city grid for playing Pac-Man, the Eighties video game, on a human scale; others reward the first person to solve a trail of location-based clues. What they have in common is an urge to combine zippy new technologies with real-life social interaction.
The phenomenon has picked up the label "urban gaming", although you will also hear it called "location-based gaming" or "outdoor mixed-reality gaming". At first, the creative drive came from academics and artists, but corporate marketing departments are now sponsoring what they hope will be the next buzz on the streets.
Hasbro used an urban game last month to promote a new version of Monopoly, wherein the rent payments on players’ houses and hotels were determined by the movements of 18 London taxis, tracked over the internet via GPS. In the US in spring, phone company Qwest organised a series of ConQwest tournaments, in which school teams competed to find special bar codes hidden around various cities.
Mostly, these games reward problem-solving and thinking on the run; clues are provided via wireless iPaq connections or SMS messages containing GPS coordinates. Sometimes, though, the goal is simply old-fashioned fun. Why else would groups of strangers run around New York playing the roles of Inky, Blinky and the other characters from Pac-Man? Last year, the streets around Washington Square Park formed the grid for PacManhattan, in which one player ran around collecting virtual "dots" while avoiding being eaten by the nasty ghosts. The game, developed at New York University, used mobile phones and wireless internet connections to track players’ movements and broadcast them to a wider audience over the net. Later this year, a National University of Singapore team plan to take the game to the next level, using virtual-reality headsets and goggles so players can see where they are in the grid. Alas, rather than actually eat one another, they merely have to tap each other’s shoulders.
Urban gaming may be a global trend, but a British team of artists can claim credit for popularising it. Blast Theory, based in East London, is behind a series of games that have used 3G phones and webcams to locate players within real-life environments. In one such game, Uncle Roy All Around You, street players in London and West Bromwich, carrying handheld computers, worked with online participants to find postcards hidden around the city and, eventually, the elusive Uncle Roy. Another, I Like Frank, took over the streets of Adelaide. Whether playing on the ground or logging in from around the world, participants, as the artists saw it, were "testing the possibilities of a new hybrid space".
That may over-intellectualise what has fast become an energetic alternative to passive entertainment, in keeping with mobile clubbing, iPod parties and some of the other social-networking trends explored in this slot. Plus, it has one killer advantage over the Xbox: it gets you out of the house ...
(The Times Magazine, July 23 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, July 23, 2005
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