Story-Driven Games: Frequency 1500
January 23, 2005 (Filed under: Personal, Inspiration, Location-Based Games)While playing around with the software over Christmas vacation, I managed to add about 20 items to my "to-do" list for Herecast. (That includes a few "how-did-I-miss-that?" bugs in the latest version.) Getting away from active development for a while gave me time to brainstorm some great new feature ideas. It's this kind of thing that gets me excited about the project--seeing all the possibilities for where it might eventually lead. (It's also nice to realise that some of the most troublesome problems have the simplest solutions.)
But since the job search is more important at the moment, I'll fill this space by presenting a few more recent articles from around the web covering location-based services.
The first comes from IN-duce (a link I first posted a few months ago.) They have a reference to a new educational location-based game, Frequency 1500. Located in Amsterdam, this pilot project demonstrates a story-based approach to a treasure hunt game.
For one to two days, players roam through the city in small groups. GPS makes it possible to know the position of your team (and of other players or objects). To prove they're the most worthy order of pilgrims, a team will need to demonstrate their knowledge of medieval Amsterdam by doing location-based media-assignments on the city's history. As they wander through the streets of medieval Amsterdam, they get in virtual phone contact with characters that provide information on locations and on the strange disappearing of the holy relic. In the meantime, they're competing with the other teams. GPS technology and mobile phones turn the city into a medieval playingfield.
You might call this the modern equivalent of that 80's game, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"
I mention this because one of my favourite examples of a location-based game has always been a detective story, where you play the part of a secret agent searching the city (or campus) for clues to help you track down something. You could imagine this playing a bit like The Amazing Race.
