The best mobile game ever
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Futures, Windows Mobile, Hardware, HP, Wireless, Mobile on
It’s dark. The South Bank is brightly lit, but Jubilee Gardens is a dark stretch of grass between the London Eye and the road, with only an avenue of trees garlanded with fairy lights for illumination. And there’s five of us with one iPAQ Traveller, one camera, one backup set of paper instructions, three GPS-labelled mole holes and ten moles to whack. And we’ve forgotten which hole is which. Is this the future of mobile gaming? I hope so, because it’s huge fun.
The London Girl Geek Dinners are a mobile feast, meeting wherever the technology company sponsoring the evening suggests. This time it was upstairs at the British Film Institute, and the serious business of the evening was Helen Vaid, managing director of HP’s Snapfish photo printing service in Europe talking about being an entrepreneur and balancing that with working for a large company and Jo Reid of HP’s Bristol research labs talking about some of the projects she’s worked on, including mscape.
Reid has a vision of pervasive computing overlaying a digital layer on the world around us. Geotagging is one way to do it, but that’s after the fact and away from the place. Geocaching is another, but the GPS is a tool that you use like a map rather than part of the fun. Short for Mediscape, mscapes are games, stories and guides triggered by your location; they run on an iPAQ Traveller, which is a Windows Mobile 5 device with a built-in GPS - so it knows when you’re in the right place to give you clues, directions and instructions and when to record your score. Think scavenger hunt or virtual hide and seek… It’s harder to explain than it is to do and that’s how we spend 90 minutes before the main meeting, in teams of five, in the dark, running up and down the Embankment.
We head out of the BFI into the cold, trying to listen to the instructions as they go - full volume is still too quiet but Jo Reid has already told us the basics. We get a GPS signal as we pass the National Theatre and a clue pops up on screen. Unfortunately I don’t stop in time and we walk out of range and walking in circles watching the little figure on the map approach the push pin where the clue should be doesn’t bring it back up. We give up on the first clue for now and head for the next pushpin; we think it’s going to be the pier but it shows up as we pass an ad hoarding: who did Avril say See you Later to? We pore over the hoarding by the light of the iPAQ screen and then realise the answer is just a little further on at the skate park.
Up pops a message on screen to climb the stairs; this could have saved me half an hour waiting for my sister in the summer when we discovered our interpretations of ‘in front of the Royal Festival Hall’ differed by a height of some 20 feet. Outside the RFH the game asks us to enact a scene from Misdummer Night’s Dream; here Simon is the Wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe kiss.
There are more questions as we walk down towards the London Eye, answered by looking on lamp posts, sculptures and the poetry in the paving stones. The 5-15m accuracy of GPS means that sometimes I have to stand in the right place to see the question while the rest of the team wanders around looking for the right place to see the answer; we resort to Google to find out what to look for one occasion. And then as we get to Jubilee Gardens the map shows two ‘agility’ challenges and a logic puzzle and this is when we start running around in the dark.
Ben takes the first agility challenge, which is holding the iPAQ up to his chest to record his heart rate, taking 25 long strides and then running back and forth at shorter and shorter intervals until the game asks for a second heart rate and gives him a high score. He lights up a cigarette to celebrate and we try the logic puzzle. This is a combination of Battleship, Boggle and Mastermind as we mark a playing area, hunt for unexploded bombs that are randomly positioned and have to be found by GPS and disarmed by solving a colour code or making words from letters - and get blown up three times. We keep getting the colour code puzzle and we keep getting it wrong. In the end we give up and try Whack a Mole.
This is much simpler; we pick three spots not too close together as mole holes, station the photographer to catch us in action and when the game says there’s a mole at hole one the runner dashes there with the GPS and taps the screen to whack the mole. Repeat for all ten moles and then rush back to record our final time and have the scores read from the devices…
The games and questions aren’t taxing - though I want to have another go at UXB in the daylight after I’ve practiced Mastermind a few more times - but they’re involving and the time limit keeps you going. If you’ve got a Windows Mobile device with GPS you can download several mscapes including UXB and Whack a Mole as well as a game for escaping from the Tower of London and a ranger-guided hike through Yosemite from http://www.mscapers.com/home; you can also get the software for making your own mscapes.
Second Life and virtual worlds don’t appeal to me because the real world is so rich and in-world always seems a quantised second best - IM with a fancy screen saver. Mediascapes and what I think of as place coding adds virtual experiences to the real world; it could be an adventure game with prizes, a guided tour that knows what building you’ve reached even if you take the wrong turn, restaurant reviews for the restaurant you’re standing in front of… I’d like it to link to Linked In or Facebook for my friends and Dopplr or online calendars for where they are and pop up an IM window if they’re within getting-together distance. I could get bus and train timetables as I get close to the bus stop or station. Post It notes for the real world. And a really fun way to spend a cold evening. Try it out - and if you work out the colour code puzzle, come play a game with us some time.
-Mary
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Loading ...Comment by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe - November 15, 2007 on 9:22 pm
As one of the other players, I have to say, it was a fun way of exploring the South Bank area, learning new things, and getting to know new people. An ideal team bonding exercise, I suspect!
Comment by Dave Eff - November 21, 2007 on 11:40 am
Sounds fun - in the old days we used to do the same with clues in jam-jars. At least this way no one can change the clue! DaveF http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/user-blogs/dave-f/
Comment by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe - November 21, 2007 on 12:07 pm
and you have have lots of different people without needing a different jamjar for each group 
-M
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