Big Games: Playing in the streets

On a warm, sunny day in New York City students dressed in curious outfits race along the streets of Greenwich Village. Several floors up, just south of Washington Square Park, another group of students stare into laptop monitors displaying what looks like the game board from Pac-Man. Instead of using a joystick to control their avatars, they bark orders into cell phones. “Run to the corner of 8th and 6th Ave. and go left. Blinky’s after you!”

These students are playing a game of their own invention called Pac-Manhattan based on the classic arcade game Pac-Man (see Figure 1).

Pac-Manhattan

Figure 1: Pac-Manhattan game in progress. A ghost closes in.

Up in this makeshift control room, the city has been transformed into a game board. The players see Pac-Man grids marked with the names of the streets around Washington Square Park. As Pac-Man and the ghosts move around the streets below, their locations update on the screen. With the assistance of his controller, Pac-Man can effectively see ghosts for an entire block around him.

“Pac-Man, you’re going the wrong way, Pac-Man,” the man selling incense on 6th Avenue yells after the young man draped in yellow and adorned with what appears to be a gigantic foam cheese wedge (see Figure 2). Pac-Man knows something this man does not, however, and so he continues to barrel down 6th Avenue. Pac-Man follows the orders coming from the cell phone pressed to his sweating ear. A moment later another young man dressed as Inky, the blue ghost dashes by, and it becomes clear Pac-Man made the right choice.

“He’s chasing Pac-Man . . . Aww he’s gonna catch Pac-Man and mess him up,” the incense seller proclaims to his laughing friends. These bystanders quickly realize what is going on, understanding how the street grid around Washington Square Park does in fact resemble a Pac-Man grid, with the big gaping hole formed by the park providing the home for the ghosts. Bystanders and players share in the joke and the realization that the city landscape itself can serve as a game board.

mobile phones

Figure 2: Pac-Manhattan uses mobile phones to play on the city grid. Photo by Mary Hodder.

Created in the Spring of 2004 by a group of students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Pac-Manhattan remains one of the prototypical location-based games. Mattia Romeo, one of the designers of Pac-Manhattan, has since worked on and designed a host of similar games, from the semacode-based scavenger hunt Conqwest, to the massively multiplayer cell phone fighting game, Gangs of GDC. Romeo, now a game designer at New York developer Gamelab, explains the appeal of the original: “There was something instantly recognizable and playful about watching someone dressed up as Pac-Man being chased through New York City streets. People instantly understood what the game was about. This sense of watching an absurd street performance while still being able to easily project oneself into the role of the players and understand what they were doing made the game very engaging.”

Pac-Manhattan belongs to a growing movement of games that have burst the confines of the PC and game console. From all-night scavenger hunts to GPS-enhanced hide and seek, these games put to use the growing ubiquity of mobile technology to enable people to play in new ways. They make cities into gaming platforms and give new meaning to the term “wireless controller.”

Defining a movement

These games are sometimes referred to as “pervasive games,” “location-based games,” and “mobile games”—terms that describe subgenres of this emerging field, rather than defining the movement. The term “pervasive games” stems from the fact that many of these games integrate with the real-world and everyday life. MogiMogi, a game for your cell phone, travels with you as you go about your daily business, allowing you to earn points as you physically visit new locations and come into contact with other players. Meanwhile, a game like Pac-Manhattan, with its fundamental ties to the street grid and cell phones, certainly earns both the moniker “location-based” and “mobile.”

Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, founders of leading game developer area/code prefer the term “Big Games.” Their manifesto states, “Big Games are large-scale, multiplayer games that include some form of real-world interaction.” In this way the term “Big Games” seems to bring together the emerging genres into a single movement.

And the field is becoming increasingly crowded. Everyone from game companies, to advertising agencies, to cell phone makers, to artists have discovered that the public is increasingly interested in these new types of play.

Go mobile

The last decade saw an explosion in the development of mobile technology. We walk around everyday with powerful computing devices in our pockets, from phones to PDAs. As these devices become more location aware, integrating global positioning systems, bluetooth, wi-fi, and cameras, they offer exciting new potentials for gaming (see Figure 3).

a game of Cruel 2 B Kind

Figure 3: Players are alerted that a game of Cruel 2 B Kind is underway. Photo by Kiyash Monsef.

One of the most important aspects of any game is being able to understand and keep track of the state of the game. Every game must have a mechanism to track game state. It may be as simple as keeping score in a game of pick-up basketball or more elaborate as with the dozens of houses and hotels spread across a Monopoly board. In both cases, these elements track the progress of the game and communicate to players how they should act.

Computer chips allowed games to keep track of an exponentially larger number of variables than people could be expected to remember, leading to games with more complex game states. A videogame like Sid Meier’s Civilization can track thousands more stats than the board game it was originally based on because it can hide much of the game state from players and only display what is useful.

With better mobile technology, games can track numbers of players, where they are, and where they have been. Mobile technology also allows game masters to communicate with larger numbers of players, directing the action of the game. This opens up a wide array of new possibilities for design. Suddenly a game can spread across an entire city and involve hundreds of players.

Designers are making full use of the technology found in modern cell phones. Games like Casablanca and Cruel 2 B Kind make use of SMS messaging to communicate with large groups spread over large areas. In Cruel 2 B Kind, developed by game designers Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, players engage in a game of benevolent assassination. They receive their orders through SMS messages and then must find and “kill their target with kindness” by paying them a specific compliment.

In Casablanca, a game currently in development by Situated Games, players try and discover secret agents lurking within their networks of contacts. The game uses social software as a platform for gaming. Players communicate and coordinate with each other through SMS messages.

A number of games use the cameras built into phones to stage elaborate photo scavenger hunts. Photos provide a good way to verify that a player has been to a particular location or seen a specific item. On the downside, it can be difficult to make out objects in these low-resolution photos and they can also be faked. But, because cameras are more ubiquitous in cell phones than location-tracking services, more people get the chance to play. In fact, games like Snap Shot City, a photographic treasure hunt, involve players from across the globe.

DIY gaming

A number Big Games sport a sort of rough DIY aesthetic, cobbling together different types of technology and encouraging players to be creative participants. Game designer Catherine Herdlick has created a range of different games that communicate messages through the context of play, from the grassroots alternate-reality game Lawn Games for Life to Big Games like Bike Friendly City (see Figure 4).

Bike Friendly City

Figure 4: Bike Friendly City takes its message to the streets. Photo by Catherine Herdlick.

Bike Friendly City is a wonderful and personal game in which players compete to gather resources and then actually draw new bike lanes on the street in chalk. After players draw their bike lanes they document them with camera phones on Flickr, claming streets and intersections. The game combines quick play with a sly bit of graffiti to make players think. Said Herdlick, “Lawn Games was more personal, all about family and holidays and stuff. But Bike Friendly City is just about expressing my love for riding bikes in New York City and my frustration with cars when they get in the way and make it hard for all of us to get along.” Herdlick carefully crafts the mechanics of the games to invoke certain situations and perspectives. “I think of designing a game as designing an experience. I try to think about how I want people to interact with each other to create certain attitudes about that experience.”

The roots of play

The upsurge in Big Games dovetails with a general trend in authorship. From blogs to YouTube to Flickr, end-users are taking an active role in producing and controlling their experiences. In contradiction to the image of the isolated gamer staring into a computer, games are actually extremely social. From dominoes to pick-up basketball to World of Warcraft, games give us focal points for social interaction. They allow us to feel active. Big Games up the ante. They bring you out into public and force you to actively interact. In this way, Big Games signal a return to the roots of play. Most of us spent our formative years playing games outdoors, enjoying the visceral pleasures of running, such as Tag, and Hide and Seek, and Assassins. Often, these new games are just technologically enhanced versions of older, traditional forms of play.

According to Alex Fleetwood, “The freedom that Big Games give the player to use their imagination and to project themselves into the game space, to 'play out' a simple narrative in a slightly anarchic and unstructured way, is liberating and exhilarating. Doing it in the streets of a city highlights just how transgressive it is to play and exaggerates this rush. City streets are intended (and legislated) for travel, for commerce, motor vehicles, for getting from A to B without interacting with your fellow man. Playing in them reminds us of what we have lost from our adult lives and enables us to reclaim that playful part of ourselves.”

Can Big Games be big business?

Up until now mobile games has generally meant ports of old arcade games or simply the trilling ring of another subway rider playing Bejeweled. Game companies and mobile providers have viewed the screens and computing power of phones as platforms for traditional video games. But increasingly, companies are seeing the potential in leveraging other features of the phones.

Companies like Nokia have made significant investments into researching other ways phones can used for games. area/code got its start by developing a game for Qwest Communications called Conqwest. The game was played in cities around the Western part of the United States. Teams of players would compete to find photograph and semacodes using cell phone cameras. area/code has gone on to produce a number of other innovative Big Games for large clients, including Sharkrunners, a game developed for the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” that uses the location of real-world white sharks tagged with GPS units.

Designing for chaos: A case study

Not all Big Games require the latest technology. Many games find interesting ways to repurpose existing technology and infrastructure. I worked on a game called Payphone Warriors (see Figure 5) that used a part of the city most of us have come to ignore.

A Payphone Warrior

Figure 5: A Payphone Warrior captures enemy territory. Photo by Amanda Bernsohn.

We wanted to make a fast-paced game in which teams of players tried to capture city territory. We knew the most important piece of information we wanted to collect was player location. GPS seemed the first logical answer, but the devices are not cheaply available and they do not always work well in cities with tall buildings. We could have relied on the players to tell us where they were, as in Pac-Manhattan, but as the game grows more chaotic this information often becomes unreliable. We could have placed codes or stickers, but these lend themselves to cheating because they can be easily copied and phoned in from anywhere.

So, we looked around for objects that are nailed to the ground and that had a unique identifier. This is how we settled on using payphones. Each phone has a unique number that can be identified by caller ID. They are also very hard to move. Once we discovered that most of the payphones in New York do in fact actually work, we began to have a way to shape the chaos of players running around the streets. After mapping all of the phones in an area, we saw a terrain emerge in which each phone could serve as a base that could be captured, similar to the traditional game of capture-the-flag.

We programmed a backend system for the game using the open-source PBX Asterisk. This allowed us to identify when a player dialed into the game system. It also allowed us to play audio feedback to the player through the phone. The end result was a fast-paced game that feels almost like a sport. Teams of players swarm around the play area trying to capture the payphones by making calls. When they call in to capture a phone, they are given updates about the score and rankings.

The design of Payphone Warriors highlights some of the crucial design challenges of making Big Games. Designers must find the right technology to fit the game. After exploring ways to use everything from GPS-enabled phones to SMS messages to identify and then broadcast the state of the game, we came back to using the phone in a very basic manner—to capture dial tones and deliver audio.

Games are amazing ways to quickly engage people and change the way they see their surroundings by changing their behavior. Through the use of rules, games have the power to transform our interactions. Nick Fortugno, who teaches Game Design at Parsons and was one of the designers of the seminal Big Urban Game, describes the power of Big Games succinctly, “These games don't take you out of the world. They take you out of your normal perception of the world.”