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Blast Theory Unwires Online Games
Wired is running a story on "wireless games" as being developed by Blast Theory. They are games played on mobile phones using GPRS to deduce the physical location of the game player, which is used as part of the game. Two different game ideas are touched on, as well as some discussion of where the ideas came from and where they're going. Cool stuff that even sounds fun, and reminds me a bit of playing tag with CB radios.
Common users in the UK don't use gprs (at least, none that I know) because it is slow and far too expensive: while it may be fast enough for these sorts of games, it will still stay quite expensive because service providers have significant infrastructure costs and they have to overcharge in some areas so they can be competitive in others. In other news, look at some of the great ideas for wireless gaming that have fallen flat: namely Nokia's N-Gage. Perhaps real multiplayer gaming (and gaming communities) are just for games consoles, PCs and Macs?
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
I hope this won't signify a big invasion of privacy. I'd hate to be able to be pinpointed by any schmuck with a cell phone.
Combine it with flash mob activism for two trendy memes in one! Cell phone tag in the boardroom or to disrupt an abortion clinic.. brilliant.
We wanted the discrete boundaries of online community to bleed out into the real world, and we wanted to see how this might change people.
I wonder what slashdot trolls are like in the real world.
It would certainly change our online community quite a bit.
What if my real-world location places me inside a wall etc. within the game?
amazing
Lame as fuck, but at least it gets geeks to go outside.
Wow. I cannot wait until they expand this further. Forget pencil and paper AD&D. Imagine expanding on this idea and using known-maps of cities as the dungeons where you take up a character and text message your responses. "I am Tier, master of the Bronx." Certainly redefines the idea of the RPG.
That touches on one problem I have concerning the game. I think they will have trouble with game dynamics until they are able to provide real-maps of the service area. Imagine having to reach a point in the game that, in your world, would put you in the middle of the river, or inside a concrete wall. I suppose that you could possibly re-define your position, but for users in crowded areas (like the test cities that they mentioned), this would get frustrating. It would not have to be terribly detailed, since the landscape often changes, but it should not be too difficult to define the main buildings of the city and use this as the background map for the game.
The only question that I have is: how reliable is the positioning? I realize that they are not using straight-GPS, but I am curious as to how reliable the positioning is. When I was working on autonomous robot navigation (keeping in mind that we did not have a differential GPS system readily available), we had problems with floating satellite positioning that sometimes put the target nine foot away from its actual position. The article mentioned getting within five meters, which makes the nine foot floating irrelevant (unless both positions ended up 9 feet on either side from eachother), but I am curious nonetheless.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
The idea is great...but as usual, this poses yet more potential for bad driving. If they get good at the pinpointing, I can very well see kids in cars literally playing tag...except this time instead of running in a field, they'll be endangering other drivers.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
You could redo the entire movie with these new games.
Jeoin
hmm, this technology sure could have helped those involved in Olympic Hide and Seek.
... (we see Don Roberts practising hiding) our own Don Roberts from Hinckley in Leicestershire who, his trainer tells me, is at the height of his self-secreting form. And now in the first leg, which ended on Wednesday, Don succeeded in finding the Paraguayan in the new world record time of 11 years, 2 months, 26 days, 9 hours, 3 minutes, 27.4 seconds, in a sweetshop in Kilmarnock. And now they're under starter's orders.
Comentator: Hello, good afternoon and welcome to the second leg of the Olympic final of the men's Hide-and-Seek here in the heart of Britain's London. We'll be surfing in just a couple of moments from now, and there you can see the two competitors Francisco Huron the Paraguayan, who in this leg is the seeker (we see Francisco Huron darting about, looking behind things) and there's the man he'll be looking for
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What would be even extra cool is if they would integrate the sign-reading technology into this product. I poked around to try and find some links to that old story but came up empty.
We spend most of our time planning quilting bees and such. Feel free to attend one sometime. Most often, we provide punch and pie!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Wireless data with CB radio's didn't work very well for me.
Eight bit home computers had plastic cases with no shielding.
They produced lots of noise that interfered with radio reception and transmitting near them caused crashes, paticularly if you illegally used one of the cheap non-linear harmonic spewing amplifiers sold to CBers.
I only had one friend geeky enough to participate so it was quicker to bike the mile to his house with a cassette tape than to mess about sending something to him at 300 baud. Hours of fun though.
Years later I got a ham license and went on the packet radio network.
It was like newsgroups and fidonet, I contacted my local bbs and messges were stored and forwarded across the global. It took about a month to send a message from the UK to Australia and get a reply. Then we eventually got flat rate internet and everyone lost interest in packet.
In the last few years all the local geeks, hackers and technical types with any enthusiasm have moved south for jobs and opportunitys. I should have followed them. A few people in the Newcastle linux user group are interested in building an 802.11 WAN but we don't have enough people to get it off the ground.
It reminds me of the movie The Game (1997) starring Michael Douglas.
And to add to the "evil angle" the whole project has real villains ... Spooky ...
And then is this feeling of Oh Shit! that I have always wanted to feel in case of Ashcroft or RIAA/MPAA come for me and the Bad Boys ... Would love to feel it vicariously rather than in reality .. like the audiences loved "touching" death when the saw from a safe distance the Gladiators battling to death ...
Wow, No Shit ! I would love to feel that Shit too.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
No one's noticed yet that this thing is partially (no percentage mentioned) funded by Microsoft Research? I dunno about the collective you, but that gives me the heebie-jeebies...
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
It's just a cheap way of getting you to spend more money on phone calls and mobile phones by creating a phoney buzz about a 'cool' new game.
There's one born every minute.
People could play "Highlander" -- when another "immortal" is near, the phone goes off -- a battle ensues and one is dispatched.
How about we just run around the city at night and play rock-paper-scissors at each other?
Do we really need cell phones to have a good LARP?
Stupendous!
Finally, an excuse to chop random stranger up with my cool samurai sword!
These are precisely the types of games I've been waiting for: ones that put all the entertainment of current (okay, okay, of the previous years) into the real-world environment. I want to run around in public with a fake rocket launcher whilst playing AR (Augmented Reality) DOOM! Mmm, I bet the corpses will still be staring up at me even after I walk around to the other side...
except cb radios are kinda dumb now.
So soon we'll see people running into the middle of the road shouting "I got the item!!". Then a few seconds latter they get run over. They better make this thing safe.
Anytime someone mention cell phone and games, I think of lousy tetris or pacman type games with 16bit graphics at best.
Anytime someone mention wireless cell phone and games, I think of Nokia N-Gage the most poorly launched video game system in the history of the gaming industry.
If you ask me, cell phones, wireless and gaming just don't mix yet. This stuff is targeting an audience that are anything but hardcore gamers who play only half hour of games in a whole day.
I can see it now. Kids are going to start walking around with little tin foil hats on their cell phones just to win...
GAME OVER, MAN!!
Clever signature text goes here.
Now we'll see sexual predators that use the game to play tag with their victims.. with more and more kids being given cell phones by their parents to keep tabs on them the some sick bastards are probably learning they can do the same.
Time for CellNanny..
This is exactly that the games produced by It's Alive! and YDreams are about. These games are location-based (using GPS or network cell ID), but add the "always-connected" feature and you have pervasive gaming .
i'm afraid i forget what it was called (majesty or majestic or some such thing) but does anyone think this sounds like an opportunity for a sequel? i.e., it sends you a fax or whatever saying to GO to this place and then checks via your cell phone if you made it? maybe at these coordinates, one can find the sword of narzle?
just a thought.
If there is hope, it lies in the prowles.
All you hafta do is answer a few fun locale-related questions and suddendly cops come to your door for even mroe entertaining justice in action!
Yes I realize this came a little to late to try on saddam...comon america!
Many Thanks,
Luke
How do you use GPRS for positioning? GPRS or General Packet Radio System is a communications protocol and IS NOT GPS.
The similarity of their acronyms is unfortunate.
It's not the posters fault though, they do make this same statement very briefly in the article.
Am I missing something?