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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.
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.
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 .