Social, Local, Gaming

It may not be something we’re working on at the moment, but something that has piqued my interest as of late is the rise of social location platforms such as foursquare and gowalla. I’m not going to weigh in on which is going to take off, or who and who isn’t the next twitter, but I do think there are some interesting possibilities for games, some area already being explored, and some are yet to be discovered.

Obviously both of the services above have some game-like elements themselves; foursquare has badges and mayorships, gowalla has virtual geocaching and trips. What could be more fun though is once people developing full games that use these services.

Imagine a game of pacman using an entire city.

Whilst location aware pacman in itself is cool enough, I think that once these services become more mainstream we could see some fantastic stuff. What about a Matrix style game where you have to reach a specific point to “jack out” before the agents (other players) catch you? Or a gigantic virtual game of Cleudo where you search for virtual clues at different locations around the city? Anyway, people are already making this kind of thing, for example MyTown by Booyah! games for the iPhone, which is like a location aware augmented reality version of monopoly (try not to sound like a geek trying to explain that to someone), where you can buy your favourite coffee shop and start squeezing your fellow for (sadly, virtual) rent. This is a space I’ll be watching with interest, and hopefully one day RPNi will be making a foray into it.