Benford, et al.
Steve Benford and Amanda Oldroyd
Uncle Roy All Around You: mixing games and theatre on the city streets
This presentation will describe early experiences of designing and publicly deploying mobile mixed reality games ö that is games that mix online and street players. These experiences have been carried out within the Equator project that is investigating new ways of merging physical and digital interaction to enhance everyday life (www.equator.ac.uk ) and have involved collaboration between the University of Nottingham, the artists group Blast Theory, and BTexact Technologies.
Our presentation will describe two experiences: Can You See Me Now?, a game in which up to twenty online players are chased across a virtual model of a city by three performers who are running through the actual city streets equipped with PDAs, Wifi and GPS (see www.canyouseemenow.v2.nl ); and Uncle Roy All Around You, a game in which public street players, in this case using PDAs with GPRS, find their way through the city streets, trying to meet with the elusive character Uncle Roy, and being guided or hindered by online players (see www.uncleroyallarondyou.co.uk). Can You See Me Now has been staged twice: in Sheffield in late 2001 where it received over 200 online plays over a weekend, and in Rotterdam in early 2003, where it received over 1000 online plays over six days. It has been nominated for BAFTA and Ars Electronica awards and is due to be staged in Germany in July 2003. At the time of writing, Uncle Roy is in the final stages of development and is due to premiere in London in late May, hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
We will draw on these two experiences to highlight key challenges involved in creating pervasive games, and to offer some early design guidelines for the gaming community. These will focus on areas such as: coping with and even exploiting the uncertainties that are inherent in positioning and wireless networking technologies; creating game structures that exploit the differences in perspective between online and street players; and the role of streamed audio and video in providing supporting context information to online players.
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