Playing With Place – Location-Based Games and Services
Playing With Place – Location-Based Games and Services
Katherine Herdlich – San Francisco. Runs Come Out and Play
Location-based Gaming. Context means everything, not just the geo location. Blurred lines between physical and digital mean you can play anywhere. COAP wants public forum for play, city-sized fun. Not virtual worlds or virtual reality. Alternate Reality games. STREETWARS KILLER. Geo-caching – iphone app for this.
Scenic Route – take a walk with your mobile phone. http://m.scenicroute.com
Zack Saul – Retronyms – See and Spell, a realtime location based game
Seek’n spell. GPS location, download a satellite photo of surroundings, little letter tabs. Recreational location- based game, real time and multi player. Unexpected used of platform.
Brooke Thompson – freelance experience designer, ARG-fest. Giantmice.com
Financing comes through branding partnership.
Break a story down into tiny components, allowing players to reconstruct it by discovery. Tends to be a little bit more lowtech. Trying to engage people.
Aldridge: a rewrite of HP Lovecraft. Group of characters who can’t handle technology at all. Where could they live? 13,000 square miles of wire-free zone in west virginia. 6 players were willing to go there, to a place in the middle of nowhere. A train takes then to the top of the mountain and leaves them there. The Place itself did everything for them as it was spooky. Characters were hired to enhance the story. A kidnapping, etc, which couldn’t have been done anywhere else.
In NYC, the characters would suffer in the face of technology. A scavenger hunt that went all through the city, engaging players online through webcam system. Clues held up to webcam, actors performed in front of webcam. Remnants of Indian mounds – boxes containing spooky artifacts, etc.
Strong orientation towards story. Other examples of ARGs that use space and technology.
I Love Bees, Last Call Poker, Why So Serious
Application: Hidden Park
Seth Brebeck – Scvngr – global geo-game that uses wed-based toolkit
New platform for high tech location based mobile games, tours, and interactive experiences.
Jeweller promotion – high tech treasure hunt for lost diamond.
Scvngr builder – business model is about licensing the software.
Diamond Dashes
Smithsonian
Darpa Balloon Challenge: military research institute. Challenge to take 10 red balloons and hide then in the US and whoever finds them first, via longitude and latitude, wins $40K. Low tech and high tech game. MIT team won, creating a meta game, creating viral and fast growing network to identify ten balloons around country.
Helicopter game onscreen and off.
