Location based games

Paul Baron has made this splendid list over existing location based games. These games usually require a mobile phone and a GPS, and takes place in an outdoor area, preferably a city.

I would like to see some research be done on this subject. Is there for instance any inventive game play going on here, or is it more like a new arena for already existing (live) games? What I find most intriguing is the question of what ontological status a game with such blurred boundaries will have. I accidentally found a quote from Baudrillard, in Frank Schaaps book about roleplaying MUDs that speaks of another "collapse" in the boundaries between reality and virtuality:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland...Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.
Baudrillard (1983)

This might be a bit too subversive for most people, but in the case of these Location based games we can actually see the "real" America become more virtual than what is normally agreed on.

Students

Had the first lecture with my students yesterday. Of the 18 who showed up, 11 had home pages and 4 of them even their own blogs! Many of them were also experienced with MUDs an MOORPGs. That's great. I'm looking forward to working with them and getting to know them better.

On a more weird note, all of them were male. Which is far from typical of the students at our department. Hopefully some Gaming Girls will show up later in the semester.

Our designer is still struggling with getting the course blog and the web site working, but it will hopefully be online some time next week.

Ceciliantas

One of the more sited online sex encounters lately, shows the unfortunate player Ceciliantas having online sex in EverQuest 2. It is safe to say that the poor guy could have handled things more smoothly when trying to cover up the incident. He has been insistently posting about it on several forums, which in large only seem to fuel the fire. His fame has even made it into urban dictionary.

Strangely enough a player with the same name registered at the Discworld MUD a couple of weeks ago, and made a big bravado on the boards, announcing his arrival. This character is most likely a hoax made by another player, but illustrates how an incident like this can spread and be reenacted in other arenas on the net.

Farklempt!

Wired has an article about an art/game project called The smile project. New media artist and computer programmer Jason Van Anden has created an online 'game' or 'art piece' called Farklempt!. According to Wired, the inspiration for this game came from his eight years of group therapy and observation of group dynamics.

I just tried it out, and frankly I find this to be a sad excuse for a game. Well, group therapy is hardly a cheerful inspiration for anything, but that is not the reason why this game, basically, sucks. There are several reasons why this game isn't working.

First, it does not lend itself to easily recognizable conventions from other games. No wonder the artist/game developer strongly advice users to read the games rule section. After reading this, or rather skimming it, I still have not found any real reasons for playing it. And a game need to tell me this! Having an elaborate psychological 'theory' or meta-rationale for the game, does not relinquish my need for a goal, even if the meta-reflections are interesting on its own behalf.

Another reason why the game fails, is because it tries to be two things at the same time: both an art piece and a game. The art-part of it strives for an uniqueness that usually is valued high in the art context, while the need for recognizable play and game elements are neglected. This is the main reason it fails as a game, but it might also destroy it's ability to work as a piece of art. Any art piece will benefit from being put in a context, as art does not always reveal it's inherent meaning at the first glance, but it is hardly a mark of quality that you have to read an explanation to grasp the basic meaning of it.

Folksonomies

I just stumbled upon a discussion about 'folksonomies', which is a concept that describes emergent phenomena like Flickr, Orkut etc. In these web services the users tag the data they enter, for instance by naming a picture in Flickr. Askpang refers to Thomas Valder Wal who describe this activity as a way of making bottom-up taxonomies.

Louis Rosenfeld explains that one of the downsides with folksonomies is that the informal tagging or categorization they are based upon, isn't very useful if the user wants to search for specific material, or need to navigate through it in more systematic ways. Controlled vocabulary (or strictly developed categories) that are made by professionals and applied by professionals, will of course be more coherent and much easier to manipulate and to perform searches on.

I think maybe that this 'ordinary people versus professionals' discussion is confusing two different cultural phenomena. In an emergent system like flickr, some of the joy is that the users can toy and improvise with categories, with how the information is structured. The result is that the personal artifacts or data from the users is weaved together with other users data in new and unpredictable ways. This largely describes how cultural traditions evolves; by being used, combined and changed over time (also much like memes are spreading). This type of emergence is distributed and bottom-up, but I am not sure if I would call it a taxonomy, since the tagging or entering of metadata isn't made for categorizing as such, but for making a specific set of data communicate with others of the same kind. Without any formal agreement of how the data should be classified, it becomes a matter of sheer luck if it is labeled or tagged in a non-conflicting and coherent way.

The other phenomena (or the professional indexing activity), is how information systems is being developed. To create a system like a library index or a newspaper archive, you have to tag all data in a uniform way. These systems are not made for improvising, and having the same rigid universal system is what make information retrieval efficient. These kinds of taxonomies are by nature top-down driven, given that the makers must have the wholeness of the data in mind, when developing the taxonomic system.

The reason why these systems work differently is because they are made for quite different purposes and are used in different ways. I therefore find it strange that people seem to regard them as competing, and discuss which one of them will "survive", given that folksonomies are much cheaper than professional indexing. I honestly don't think economic reasoning is very useful on this subject.