games: Location-based Gaming

Are you sick of being told to put down the controller and get your pasty face outside for some fresh air? Well, today we’re gonna talk about location-based gaming and should give you some motivation to get up off your arse and into the real world!

So for starters, what is a location based game? Well, surprisingly enough it’s one that somehow depends on your location to progress, and it usually relies on some sort of localisation technology, such as GPS, to work this out.

Geocaching is probably the best known example, and is basically a worldwide outdoors treasure hunt. Someone hides a cache in a particular location, which can be anywhere from under a park bench to the top of a mountain and posts the co-ordinates on one of various geocaching websites. To find caches, look up co-ordinates online and then take your GPS unit and go find your treasure, typically a box containing a log book for you to record your escapades. And various trinkets from which you can select a treasure to take away, provided you replace it with something else for the next person who hits that cache. The first recorded example was in May 2000, when GPS got a lot more accurate after the removal of Selective Availablity.

Also from 2000 was Bot-fighters, one of the first location-based games to use mobile phones, although it blended this real world gameplay with online trappings. Players created robots on a website and registered them to their phones. Now the game demanded that in order to fight, your phone needed to be within a certain physical proximity to another players phone, so you played by wandering around and using GSM to tell if there were other players in the vicinity, and then attacking them by SMS.

Throughout this decade there have been a number of these games, and one of my favourites has to be Pac-Manhatten designed by Interactive Telecommunications students at NYU in 2004. It reconceptualizes Manhattan as a pacman grid in which a real life Pacman can gobble dots and chase and be chased by real life ghosts. As GPS and wi-fi weren’t too reliable in built up areas like Manhattan, the players each have a buddy or controller that they are in constant mobile phone contact with, who inputs their movements into a piece of software mapping out the games progress, and relays information back to the player.

As localization technology has become both more sophisticated, and more widely available, and ideas about gaming and interactivity have really taken hold, location-based games have been given stronger platforms and a much wider potential audience. The latest developments come from Locomatrix, a company who, in a bid to inject new ideas into the mobile gaming scene and to get kids playing outside, have developed a location-based gaming platform for you to download to your mobile phone.

You will need either a GPS enabled phone, or a compatible phone and a bluetooth GPS receiver. Download the program, and go find yourself a wide open space. Dial up a game and a gameboard which corresponds to the real world around you, will appear on your phone screen. Move around in the real world to achieve objectives in the game, such as collecting oranges in this fruit farmer game.

You can play on your own, but the fun really starts when you add in other players who are working the same map as you, which they can do either in the same real world location or hundreds of miles away. You can also design and customize your own gameboards.

So why not give it a go? You’ll find some helpful weblinks to get you started over on our website channelflip.com/games, and you can also leave us a comment and tell us about your favourite location-based games.

And here are some useful sites to get you started:

http://www.geocaching.com/
Geocaching Association of Great Britain: http://gagb.co.uk/gagb/
http://www.pacmanhattan.com/
http://www.locomatrix.com/