Futuresonic08: gaming with social media, location based

At last week's Futuresonic08Social Media Summit in Manchester, I was asked to piece togethersomething for a session on Urban & Social Media about play. And soI threw together an impromptu web-based overview of some of thelocation-based gaming experiments that have come to my attention overthe past few years. It follows a trajectory from adaptations throughuses of new media in a game-like way to fully-fledged new forms ofgaming dependent upon social technology. Keep reading for a primer onthe key events of location-based games.

The Age of Adaptation
The first games are more like homages to games, creating something in reality from something in virtuality.
First up is a simple adaptation of the classic Gameboy title Tetris,performed by the residents of a student hall at Tampere University.It's a classic - performing the puzzle drops for an audience ofonlookers and interacting between one another (and audience-players)using mobile phones. But this episode didn't incorporate social media(unless you count phones as social); it was an homage using thefacilities to hand.
PacManhattan isa similar extension of a transformation of a game from one medium toanother. Using the city streets of Manhattan, the performance occurredwithin the social environment, but external to it. The players wereonly those who were dressed up in silly costumes trying to achievetheir goals. No one else had the opportunity to have a go.
Still, the game of chase did break up the monotony of the daily commute for some city slickers.
And then there are the artists who use urban landscapes as thesettings for adaptations of old faithful game mechanics; thefirst-person-shooter-inspired Cruel 2 B Kind invites players to blast their ways around real-life locations using words of kindness rather than bullets. More examples are here, from the BFI's Hide and Seek programme.
One-sided gaming
The next series of games focussed more on the urban and rural spacesthey took place in, creating game goals to fit, rather than fitting agame into the locations.
Geocaching is a populartreasure hunt facilitated by GPS technology. Players locate an objectsomewhere in the country, take a small bit and leave something behindfor the next person. It's an analog adaptation of social media usingthe technology to support the play.
Similarly, players of the Japanese game Superstarused a variety of technologies to identify hidden gems in the urbanTokyo landscape - Puri Kura sticker machines, mobile phones, websites -and competed to generate the most connections between players.Interaction between players was sparse, and social media was used asjust another pawn in the overall goal.
Interaction and interactivity
Increasingly, artists and game developers are using social media andtechnology to connect players within the urban space. Blast Theory's Uncle Roy All Around You, and Rider Spoke(I have an extra ticket for the event happening on Sunday in Brighton -email gamesblog +at+ gmail.com if you'd like to come along) establishmutual goals for distributed people who interact via technologies.
On the other hand, We Tell Stories,a join initiative between Penguin and ARG developers Six to Start,situates participants in new technologies which document real-lifelandscapes as settings for interactive storytelling.
The Age of Mixed Reality
But the current front-runner in the integration of landscape and gaminghas been the initiatives propelled forward by ARG developers like JaneMcGonigal, Six to Start and 42 Entertainment. Inspired by books like Masquerade or ongoing broadcast projects like La Chouette D'Or(both the products of previous technologies), these game designers usenew media to bring people together in order to identify real-worldlocations which are part of the games. The famous I Love Bees phone box puzzle,which brought players together in a real-world location to hear garbledinformation at the other end of a public telephone line, or MindCandy's Perplex City puzzles like Find Satoshi, or 41 Entertainment's Vanishing Point which used landscapes as its clues, are integrating technologies and urban space in ways which herald a new generation of location-based gaming.
Which is nice, because when it's sunny, I want to play outside.