Pac Manhattan Creator Speaks Out!

simoniker writes "Frank Lantz, who used to work at game developer Gamelab and helped create Pac Manhattan, the real-life version of Pac-Man set in the streets of New York, has been talking in detail about his new company, area/code, which has been set up to create 'large-scale, real-world games'. Lantz comments: 'I've also always felt that digital games were more properly understood as a subset of games, rather than as a subset of computer media. In other words, for me Counter-Strike has more in common with tennis and golf than people tend to think. Ditto for World of Warcraft and Chess.' Is the next wave of innovation in gaming going to occur nowhere near the video game screen?"

Comments

correct link

[twitter]

http://www.pacmanhattan.com/
not
http://www.pacmanhattan/

Now I'm going to go read the site before the bots pick up the mistake and start DOSing it.

Fun, but logistically hard

[Animats]

There are lots of large-scale games you can play if you have the time, dedicated people, and money. Paintball, for example. Foxhunting. Geocaching. Push balls. Big mazes. Thunderdome at Burning Man.

The logistics tend to get you, and the cost per player-hour tends to be high. If you cut costs too much, you don't get the feeling of the exotic needed to make it work. If you screw up the game design, people can be hurt. This stuff tends not to scale well.

Then there's the problem that if you do anything wierd in an urban setting today, the lower level anti-terrorism people have a cow.

What these guys really seem to be doing is running an ad agency that does sponsored public stunts.