10 by 10 room

A researcher is looking at mashing up with Google Earth for real-time mobile gaming. The prototype — Battleship:GoogleEarth.

One person places their ships using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game grid. When the player who’s trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit, they call into the game engine and say “drop”. The game reads back the coordinates at which the “peg” was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits one of the ships, it’s a Hit, otherwise it’s a miss.

Chris points to SF0: An interface for San Francisco, halfway between an alternate-reality game and a larp and a situationist stunt and maybe something else. I’m going to bold his comment so taht you pay attention:

Now all we need is to combine progressive social action with myspace-like social whoring and we can begin to institute societal change for the better.

Meanwhile, Jane talks about “my so-called ubiquitous gaming” has an interesting itemization of the elements of “ubiquitous games”, including:

• It is a designed experience.
• It is embedded at least partially in everyday contexts and/or environments.
• It has a significant physical and material component.
• It is a distributed experience: distributed across multiple media, multiple platforms, multiple spaces.

Read them all!

:

“That’s right, ubiqutious gaming. Because the vast majority of pervasive games to date have no connection with the original design philosophy of ubiquitous computing, from which pervasive computing and pervasive game design flow.”

Jane at AvantGame reveals her double secret dissertation topic. Other pull-quotes include: “So stick that in your ‘this is not a pipe’ and smoke it!”