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Using GPS devices for games would be pretty cool--not necessarily for SimCity but other games like "Pac Manhattan".

Yes it is SO unrealistic to think that people might be so influenced by video games that they might actually ACT OUT the plot of such a video game in real life. That would never actually happen.

http://www.pacmanhattan.com/

Never.

I'll bet you find This a bit of a re-inactment then...

I noticed that this is the second video game that has been retrofitted for outdoors. Pac man was the first one that I know of. I wonder how many of these games can actually be made for the outdoors.http://www.pacmanhattan.com/about.php

. . . the delightful real-life board game from New York, PacManhattan.

Has been going on in the US for a while: http://pacmanhattan.com/

All you young whippersnappers with your "dupe" stories from 2003 and 2004. Back in my day, we had real dupes. From 2001, when Pacman was being played on the streets of New York.

But seriously, check out the videos (Coral Cache link). They're priceless. (Edit: The videos seem to be offline -- does anybody have an archive?)

"That ghost's gonna catch Pac-man, gonna *$#@ him up."

Surely, you've never heard of PacManhattan, then?
The images on the site are down at the moment, sadly, for there were some real good pics.
Anyway, here's Wired reporting on it.

These games come in many forms, such as a "fox and hounds" game, capture the flag, or a treasure hunt.

In the 1973 Woody Allen comedy, Sleeper, it was cigarettes that turned out to promote health. Now, we have instances where video games promote physical activity.

I think (hope!) that we'll be reading in Wired about a young entrepreneur who turns this into a viable business, either as a service, where games are hosted professionally (as in MMORPGs), or as a product, where games are purchased and played on a peer-to-peer basis (as in most retail games). Perhaps I'm looking at this through rose-colored glasses, (I miss playing laser tag as a kid), but I think this has the potential to turn out some fantastic stuff.
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Reminds me of http://pacmanhattan.com/about.php

How was this redundant? I was actually going to make the same post before changing my view to -1 to read the rest of the comments. Good thing that I did.

Pacmanhattan was a lower tech version of live Pacman in the streets of New York, done by students. Hell, Slashdot had an article about them 6 months ago.

http://www.pacmanhattan.com/

Google Dennis and you'll find that he was also one of the NYU students behind Pac-Manhattan - the real life Pac-Man game played in New York City - which was featured on /. back in May.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/01/ 1837215&tid=202&tid=133&tid=10

http://www.pacmanhattan.com/

It's also might be worth noting that this may have been the inspiration for (or the other way around) for Pacmanhattan (as seen here) which was woefully overlooked in the description.

I'm sure this could be incorporated into the real-life pacman played on the streets of new york...

From the Pac Manhattan website:

Q: Why didn't you use GPS?
A: We tried track the players using GPS, but ran into two problems: (1) GPS does not work well in "urban canyons", where the signal is reflected off large buildings and (2) we could not find an easy (read: cheap) way to send the geo-coordinate data from the GPS receiver back to the network. (It's hard to connect serial data to cellphones and PCMCIA cellular cards are expensive). Anyone want to donate equipment?

Um, from the site:

Q: Why didn't you use GPS?
A: We tried track the players using GPS, but ran into two problems: (1) GPS does not work well in "urban canyons", where the signal is reflected off large buildings and (2) we could not find an easy (read: cheap) way to send the geo-coordinate data from the GPS receiver back to the network. (It's hard to connect serial data to cellphones and PCMCIA cellular cards are expensive). Anyone want to donate equipment?

Um, from the site:

Using Global Positioning, WIFI internet connections, cell phones and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.