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Locative gaming: The first 10 years

Kati London from Area/Code spoke at Where 2.0 today in San Jose.
Written by Andrew Mager, Inactive

Kati London from Area/Code spoke at Where 2.0 today in San Jose. She had some awesome examples of how location has changed social interactions in gaming.

Kati London from Area/Code

In 1990, Navstar released a GPS system that changed the game. In May 2001, Clinton turned off the selective functionality of GPS which allowed citizens to build on it. A few days later the first Geocache was placed. A few days after that, it was logged and a game was created.

To make a locative game make sense, we need people, availability, good hardware and sofware, and shared social spaces like Facebook and Twitter.

In 1973, The Game started. Before that in the 60s, Assasins was around. Here are some examples of social locative games that have evolved in the past decade:

  • Big Urban Game. 2003
  • PacManhattan in 2004. Dennis Crowley of Foursquare had something to do with it.
  • Conqwest, 2005.
  • Payphone Warriors - Capturing a part of the world by calling in a from a payphone.
  • Come Out And Play Festival, 2006. This looks awesome by the way.
  • Crossroads, 2006.
  • Plundr with help from Skyhook Wireless in 2006. Appears to be shut down now.
  • Sharkrunners, 2007. From the Discovery Channel.
  • Treasure Hunt Enoshima, 2008. This was created for the Nintendo DS, where you walk around an island and discover treasiures.
  • Parallel Kingdom in 2008 was an iPhone massively multiplayer mobile game. Similar to World of Warcraft mashed up with Google Maps.
  • XBox Live uses Foursquare for style achievements and rewards. It created reputation in the system.
  • MyTown, 2009. Social play patterns like Farmville, but with a Monopoluy angle.
  • Code of Everand, 2009
  • Foodspotting, 2010. Probably the most fun game I've played in a while. You take pictures of food and accurately describe and geocode them for your social circle and the world.
  • Internet Eyes, 2010. Takes all of the CCTV footage from the UK and crowdsources it.
  • Pokewalker, 2010. An addon for Pokemon. Takes your physical activity and integreates it back into a Nintendo DS game.
  • Parrot AR Drone, 2009.
  • Avatar Machine, 2007.
  • Knight Foundation, 2009.

Geo-gaming

Once we start to see things on camera that are meant to be seen in real life, how will that change the way we think of reality?

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