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Big Games and Smart Mobs 17 May 2004 Howard Rheingold wrote the book Smart Mobs in 2002. He noted:
Early adopters used the smart mob approach in politics, organizing support for Presidential candidates in the US. In 2003, the “flash mob” emerged, initially as a New York City performance art project. A “flash mob,” as defined by the Wikipedia, is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual, and then disperse quickly.
Doonesbury organizes a flash mob for Dean Sept 03
Consumers, however, were puzzled by how these smart mobs could actually be useful to them. Sure, people could use their cell phones and messaging systems to organize and meet in a certain place (often a bar). But once they met, they often had little else to do with each other. Once the novelty faded, the attraction wore off. Enter “Big Games.” Big games use smart mob technologies to generate entertainment. Smart mobsters can now be a part of: Ø A live Pac-Man game on city streets,
Ø A high-tech scavenger hunt, called an Urban Challenge,
Ø A search for a mysterious “Uncle Roy” in a complex game called Uncle Roy All Around You. These games are events – scheduled for specific times and places. They have players on the street and players on the web. The web players are sometimes located thousands of miles away from where the game itself is being played. Recently, graduate students at NYU played real-life Pac-Man on the streets of Greenwich Village in New York. As the New York Times reported, one student was dressed as Pac-Man, and four others were dressed as the “ghosts” who try to capture Pac-Man. Each team had members in a control room who tracked the progress of Pac-Man on the streets, and tried to help their team win the game. The New York Times was there to record the capture of Pac-Man by the ghosts, after about an hour of play.
Pac-Man: The Big Game Version (New York Times photo)
Urban Challenge is a game coming to a city near you. It is part scavenger hunt and part trivial pursuit. Teams of two have to move from one check point to the next, taking pictures of themselves at each checkpoint. As with NYU’s Pac-Man, the teams on the ground are supplemented by support teams at computers throughout the world who can help solve clues or give directions.
Verizon sponsors the contests in the US, and LG provides an official “game phone” (with a camera of course).
LG VX6000 – Official Game Phone of Urban Challenge
Lisa Redburg, a gamer in Seattle, told The New York Times:
“You totally get hooked. It is just so sad when it is over, and you have to wait months for another race." The emergence of big games emphasizes the relationship between new technology and new products and services. Technology enables new products and services which, as they catch on, drive demand for more new technology. This in turn allows the offering to change. We can expect to see products, like LG’s game phone, that are designed for the specific needs of big game players. And then we can see big games changing to take advantage of the new products.
Big games also change the world a bit for non-participants as well. Imagine walking down the street of Greenwich Village and seeing a man dressed as Pac-Man running from others dressed as ghosts. Or being on a crowded street on the Las Vegas Strip and hearing a woman yell out, to no one in particular:
"What is a Mediterranean island and city off of Spain?"
This was a clue for the next checkpoint in an urban challenge game taking place in Las Vegas. From the crowd, an answer came:
“Ibiza -- Party capital of the world."
The team got their answer, and headed off to their next checkpoint, a club on the Strip called Ibiza.
Big Games have the potential to get gameplayers out of their seats and into the streets. While current versions require a great deal of preparation and are scheduled events, I can imagine a time in the very near future when a smart mob might self-organize a pickup game of Street Pac-Man on a Friday night.
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