Subject: [NEXTEL-1] "Making Wireless Roaming Fun"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:32:09 -0400

Making Wireless Roaming Fun 
By Daniel Terdiman

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63011,00.html

02:00 AM Apr. 12, 2004 PT

Paul Baron used to love riding his bicycle around the back streets of 
Tokyo with his GPS camera phone, hunting down pictures of what he calls 
the real Japan. But now he's spending a lot of his time navigating the 
city and hunting down something a little more ephemeral.

  Not long ago, a friend turned Baron on to a mobile-phone-based game 
called Mogi, Item Hunt. It sends players out and about in Tokyo 
searching for virtual treasure by using the GPS technology built into 
their phones.

  Items like flowers, fruits or creatures are "hidden" around Tokyo, and 
are visible on a city map on players' mobile phones. Players form 
teams, comb the city and try to find each item in various 
"collections." They also try to find players from other teams working 
on different collections with whom to trade.

  Baron dove right in.

  "At that time, there were already more than 10 collections, so it was 
fun," he says. "Wherever I would go, I would check the game, and there 
was always an item (nearby) I didn't have (that I could) go and get," 
which drove his girlfriend nuts.

  Mogi is but one of the latest examples of a developing trend: 
location-based mobile gaming. But according to some people familiar 
with mobile gaming, Mogi may well be the most important.

  "I think it's a next-generation mobile game," says Amy Jo Kim, who 
studies social architectures. "Some of why it's important is that it's 
based on collecting and trading-game mechanics rather than 
fighting-game mechanics. So that's gender-neutral, which is really 
appropriate for the mobile audience."

  Mogi uses GPS to determine where players are in relation to the items 
they're seeking. When a player gets within 400 meters of an item, 
they've found it, as it were, and the item's icon on the map changes 
color, so everyone knows it has been collected.

  Justin Hall, a writer who covers, among other things, mobile 
technologies, thinks Mogi's importance lies in the way it fosters 
teamwork and communication between players sitting in front of their 
PCs and those moving around with mobile phones. Effectively, he points 
out, players at PCs figure out where the players are in the city and 
direct them to the closest treasure.

  "What's astonishing about Mogi is that it provides a system for people 
to coordinate and team up and inhabit cities in ways they never have 
before," Hall suggests. "It's dispatching. It's recreational 
dispatching, like a cab company, or police or the fire department. It's 
fabulously fascinating, this idea that, hey, I'm sitting on my computer 
at home looking at the Mogi map, and that thing our group wants is over 
on the west side of town. You're the closest, so (you go get it) 
because it's important for the group."

  To Mathieu Castelli, the creator of Mogi, the fact that it makes 
cooperative teams out of the sedentary and the mobile is indeed key to 
its importance in creating community, even when certain members are 
far-flung.

  "Some of our players live outside Tokyo, in distant neighborhoods, and 
they always want to do like what the people in Tokyo do," he says. "So 
when you give them a chance to feel what daily life is in Tokyo through 
the movements of teammates moving on the Tokyo map, they enjoy 
themselves."

  As Kim points out, Mogi is rare among its peers for its non-fighting 
nature.

  Baron, who writes about the growing location-based mobile-gaming 
market, believes battle-based games such as Gunslingers, Undercover and 
Botfighers have a definite appeal, but might not be able to form 
community the way Mogi does.

  "They are about conquest and battles, and that's probably great fun, 
but how do you build a community when you have to kill the community?" 
he wonders. "It's very James-Bondy to eliminate or conquer land with a 
small device, no?"

  For now, location-based mobile gaming is a niche market, often 
depending on players owning specific phones and subscribing to specific 
carriers. For example, Mogi -- which is currently only available in 
Japan -- requires GPS phones from Japanese carrier KDDI.

  Further, such games are largely appearing in Asia and Europe. The 
United States hasn't caught up with the technology or the culture 
required to drive the games.

  "I think it's going to take a lot longer for location-based gaming to 
penetrate the U.S. market," said Kim. "I think the really exciting 
stuff is going to take off outside the U.S. for the next couple 
years.... The way we use mobile phones in the U.S. is different, 
because we don't have (much) public transportation. We're more of a 
car-based culture."

  Castelli also believes it could take some time before games like Mogi 
hit the United States.

  The sheer size of the United States means it's not a natural 
playground for a game like Mogi, which relies on dense urban areas and 
short distances between population centers to entice players to track 
down the virtual loot, or other players.

  "'Closest player 1,340 kilometers,' is not so exciting," Castelli says 
of a likely American Mogi scenario.

  Still, Castelli also says success at Mogi doesn't preclude driving. 
Rather, he says, cars can be useful to players.

  "Our best players in Tokyo are people who play by car," he says. "They 
play at the red light, at the stop (sign and) at all those breaks that 
you have to endure."

  In fact, he says the two best players have been a delivery man, who 
would collect Mogi items on his way to and from dropping off tatami 
mats, and a 32-year-old truck driver.

  Location-based mobile gaming is just getting started. The Mogis and 
Undercovers of the world have set the stage, but in order to lure mass 
audiences, game developers will have to keep innovating.

  Baron is optimistic. He foresees such gaming encompassing 
"cross-continent missions, team missions, missions or quests spanning 
days (and) encouraging different cultures to collaborate."

  Indeed, Baron says he hopes such future gaming will emphasize 
collaboration rather than fighting.

  In any case, Baron notes that as mobile technology advances, so will 
the games.

  "I think the very nature of phones -- mobility -- will somehow 
influence the genre of games and the DNA of the games that'll come 
out," he says, "and make them a new breed."

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