Couldn’t make it to Austin, Texas? Get a firsthand account of the mobile events happening this week at the SXSW Interactive Festival.

I’ve been at the SXSW Interactive conference for a couple of days now. They’ve had several good panels, already, about various issues relating to mobile technology. Not just business stuff either, but panels looking at mobile development from interesting design perspectives. So I thought I’d write up notes with the highlights of the mobile panels I attend for Workshop. Hopefully they’ll provide not only a few interesting ideas to chew on, and also give a few good jumping-off points into the deep (yet pocket-sized - heh) pool of mobile design and invention. I’ll add on my own opinions here and there because, well, I can’t really help myself.

The first mobile device panel I attended was You Are Here: Gaming and Users Geolocation in Web 2.0. The panel featured moderator Ryan Sarver of Skyhook Wireless and panelists Jeremy Irish of Groundspeak (the geo-caching company) and Bill Carter of MobZombies, as well as Socialight’s Michael Sharon and former Dodgeball founder and area/code games developer Dennis Crowley. (Full disclosure: I am in part employed by area/code, the company Crowley worked for that’s responsible for a few of the games mentioned at the panel.) This panel wasn’t specifically about mobile phones, but it was largely about GPS devices and GPS-like devices. Sarver coined the term “geo-curious.” It was a panel for the geo-curious, then, as well as the creative games people have built around this technology.

Jeremy Irish started off the panel by describing his work with Groundspeak and the geo-caching community. Geo-caching is a simple sort of user-created game where one person hides a cache of stuff somewhere on Earth and then gives the geo-coordinates and clues as to where they hid it. Other people, then, use this location data to scavenger-hunt and find the hidden items. The caches tend to be simple things, usually cheap. The first cache Irish found, for example, contained a bottle of Sunny Delight, a disposable camera and a log book. This simple game led Irish to some interesting points about location-based gaming. For starters, he wants to get people outside. Coercing gamers away from their computers into the sunshine outdoors is not an incredibly complex goal, but one that only mobile phone technology (of the major digital gaming platforms) can provide at the moment. Geo-caching is often a family activity, another element that makes it feel “healthy” in a way many traditional video games are not. According to Irish, there are currently over 500,000 caches in the world and over 3,000,000 people participating in the geo-caching community. Wow.

Irish introduced another idea that I’ve thought about on occasion, something that would seem to offer an exciting new twist on geo-caching. He mentioned the 80s text-only computer game Zork twice as a way to explain how one might overlay a more complex, large-scale, virtual game space over the real world. I loved Zork and the silly, intriguing storytelling its game designers used to conjure up the game world. And I really got into Zork Zero. (Infocom in the 80s churned out a whole slew of these “interactive fiction” games.) Connecting that sort of virtual world with the real world could create some very cool results. (These Infocom games also point out the power of words in games; mobile developers should note how evocative small bits of fun, well-written text can be. Not everything has to be 3D graphics.)

MobZombies, presented by Bill Carter, is another game about overlaying virtual spaces on the real world. It works on a more localized, less global scale, though. The concept of MobZombies is simple: you carry around a device with a map of the space you’re in. In this space there are virtual “zombies” that only show up onscreen. If the player’s real-life position gets too close to that of a zombie, the zombie attacks the player. So it’s like tag, but the zombie is spectral, only detectable on the digital map.

Two major points about this device stuck out to me. First, when overlaying virtual elements onto real space, one must be careful not to create situations where players are running into physical walls or running out into traffic because they’re staring at their little device screen and not keeping an eye on where they’re walking. It seems like a silly point, but we’ve all probably accidentally walked into something or had to deal with a driver not paying attention while doing something simple like having a phone conversation. Turning a mobile device into a game device, where the game requires concentration on winning and immersion in the game experience, creates legitimate safety issues. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I guess it’s useful to note that killing and injuring your players = bad game design, and let me go on record as being against games leading to death. Someone on the panel suggested that cities may put up “no urban gaming” signs someday, similar to the “no skateboarding” signs we see today.

The second point had to do with absolute and relative positioning and the current inability of mobile devices to handle high-resolution positioning. Geo-caching requires absolute positioning. North 30 degrees 16′ by West 97 degrees 45′ describes only one point on Earth (Austin, Texas, where SXSW is happening). And current positioning technology can’t give good enough absolute positioning right now to track positions with enough detail for you to, for example, dodge virtual zombies. So the MobZombies team had to hack together their own relative positioning device, which doesn’t know where on Earth you are, but does know with pretty good accuracy where in the room you are. This is another important distinction for game designers (and one I admittedly hadn’t really thought about). Not all location-based games need full GPS latitude-longitude info. MobZombies uses a Sony UX UMPC (a hand-sized PC) with accelerometer and compass to figure your position. They’re currently working on a more consumer-friendly Nokia Nseries version, but it sounds like this will also require external hardware.

I’m running out of time before my next event, so I’m going to have to cut down my discussion of Sharon and Crowley’s work a bit. If you’ve been paying attention to mobile tech web memes the past few years, you’ve probably stumbled upon PacManhattan, for example, and maybe Superstar Tokyo. They’re cool - you should read about them. Another area/code game is Plundr. It’s a sort of pirate/trading game where players claim “islands” (wifi hotspots) and move from island to island by physically going to different hotspots. (Plundr also runs on the Nintendo DS - a nice reminder about other devices that could make great mobile game platforms.) Plundr gets positing data from Loki, software that uses wifi hotspot data to determine location instead of GPS data. Skyhook Wireless, the company panel moderator Ryan Sarver works for, provides this neat service, which you can download from their site and play with. I live in New York, where Loki works great. I suspect that in rural areas it would become nearly useless, but if urban games are what you’re into, it could be a serious alternative to GPS for positioning.

Crowley joked about how his presentation might look familiar to anyone who saw him speak last year. His point was that there hasn’t been much development in this class of games in the past year, which is an unfortunate situation for someone who enjoys this stuff. There are a ton of opportunities for this kind of gameplay that have not been explored. He brought up, for example, how he saw a Super Mario Brothers power mushroom spray-painted on the sidewalk while running one day. Wouldn’t it bit cool if that actually did something? An actual power-up? One could go out and run and try to collect these virtual objects and get points or something. Why can’t his running path be the game board?

What do you think of these ideas, and using location in mobile gaming in general? Share your thoughts in the comments section. And I’ll have another update from SXSW, coming soon! (You can also find more SXSW coverage and transcripts at my site, Auscillate, if you’re interested.)

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