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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?"
It's probably due to the repetitive, back-and-forth style, except that if you want to one-up your opponent, you need to find their weaknesses, and there's creativity.
The problem with the idea of setting up large-scale real-world games as an alternative to video games is that they go against what makes video games so attractive in the first place.
In a (good) video game, you are taken out of your reality and allowed to live out a great fantasy world. Whether it be World Of Warcraft, or Madden or Halo, these are simply not scenarios that you can recreate without either a huge financial investment, time investment or by creating very real danger to yourself. A video game gives you all of this without requiring much of any of those.
I could see two things coming from his company;
Fun games: That are insanely expensive to participate in, and take days of real time to participate in
or
Boring games: With little time or money investment and little in the way of actual fun (see Pacmanhattan)
Maybe my brain is just to rotted out by years of gaming, but I can't see this working out.