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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?
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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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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.
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...
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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.