MapAttack and Street Grab
Gaming at large scale is a hot topic with the new technologies available. It makes for a great spatial experience where locations can be rediscovered and reclaimed in a new way with a new purpose. The practice of the production of space is very present with this new breed of games that make uses of location based technology and smart phones as well as social networking platforms. Earlier posts HERE and HERE.
Around Foursquare a few extensions have been developed such as oust.me or MobZombies. There are also games such a shadowCity or situationist operating platform independent but are crowd oriented. All these games turn real world spatial movement recorded by the mobile phones GPS in to virtual achievements and traces that allow for other players to interact with.
Image taken from mapAttack / An AR view of the game board with the locations as they are captured by the different teams (colour) and the number of points each on contributes.
MapAttack is one of these new breeds of real time, real location, virtual games. It is a game platform that runs on iOS and Android. It was developed from the Geoloqi platform. It is a multiplayer game for 4-12 players in two teams battling for supremacy over a terrain by conquering virtual locations in the real world that will count as points towards the team overall rating. Locations are conquered by being there first which will be registerd by the mobile platform and transmitted to the centralised mapAttack server. In real time all players have an overview of the current stats of the game.
MapAttack gaming session can be hosted anywhere and might come to a city near you. Check out the twitter page for updated on games and locations.
If your interested to use the API to build your own version of the game there is a developers page. The code s open source, including the mobile app.
“MapAttack is a real-time location-based GPS game powered by the @geoloqi platform. Coming to a city near you.
This video shows a visualisation of the territory captured by each team during gameplay.
Why? So you can turn the real world into a game, of course! To get to run around while doing awesome things and have fun! The feeling while playing a real-life game is one of the best things on earth. It’s not common, but it’s becoming an increasingly awesome possibility with mobile technology. We hope millions of these games occur and that we can make more of them possible. We’re always inspired by Jane McGonigal and AreaCode and we’d like to increase our ability to bring more people into real-world gaming.”
via roomthily via programmableWeb.
