PICNIC07: Dennis Crowley

Used to work on Dodgeball, now looking at how people experience urban spaces. Sounds like a micro-dopplr: once your friends are aware of your location, it encourages interactions.

Now works at Area/code. As devices and people become location-aware, they're using this data for playful purposes.

Plundr: why should games be restricted to a board? Why can't monopoly be played across Manhatten? Plundr uses wi-fi positioning and creates a commodity trading game around it. Islands are superimposed onto a real-world map by the game, and players collect items from islands to sell them on other ones. It's a bit like a location-aware dopewars, where you need to physically move.

(Wonder what, exactly, he means by "wi-fi positioning")

Done a game for the Sopranos; a game you play whilst you're watching the broadcast. Each element on the game board appears in the TV show, and the aim of the game is to position the elements on the game screen such that as many as possible are in the programme at the same time: betting that characters appear together. All synced up with the broadcast.

Shark Runners: they partnered with marine biologists, tagged real sharks, and used the movement data of these sharks in the real world game, played out in real time. It's not be played in a short setting, it's a long-term, in-the-background game.

(Is there a term for these games which involve infrequent interactions, but play out constantly?)

Dennis shows Pacmanhattan, obviously. Crossroads is a game where you capture street intersections from other players.

One for the Locomatrix crowd :)