Fab Gamecamp input – ideas about location-based games

In my  last post I summarised where I’d got to so far with my search for the active weather fronts of location-based games – and yesterday’s pickings at Gamecamp were so rich that I had to put them into their own post.

By the way – if you are within day trip range of London and interested in a mellow, friendly, interesting games unconference, check out Gamecamp.  From what I can figure, participants are mix of indie inventors, academics, and enthusiasts.   The content is whatever people want to say on the day.  There are about 10 parallel sessions of about a half hour each – so always lots going on! The lunch, from Princi, is in itself is worth the (beguilingly modest) price of admission.  But I think the best thing about it is the positive vibe in the sessions.  People offer their expertise and opinion in a constructive and supportive way.  They are genuinely nice to each other.  They work to make the session work.

And you will find yourself playing games as well as talking about them.   Last year – my first year attending – I went to a session on playground games expecting a lecture and I ended up leaping around a classroom like a 6 year old.  Well, not exactly.  Best effort though.   This year I went for something that required less agility and tried out a card game prototype called Drunken Prophets.  (Reader, I won.  No comment.)

I had been thinking about whether to do a session and almost didn’t as I’d had a pretty busy week and I felt a temptation to chill in low revs.  But one of the organisers nudged me and I’m glad she did, because so many fab people came to my session, and added a lot to my growing as yet unorganised warehouse of Useful Stuff.   Thanks everyone!

Here’s a rundown of ideas and suggestions (n.b. if I got something wrong please sing out, either via the comments form or the contact form on the About tab, on twitter or wherever):

• we had at least 4 Ingress players in the session – one super-expert (level 8!!), the others dabblers – people  agreed there was an easy enough onramp for starting play, but to really get the most out of it you had to be committed, and battery life was a huge issue with a full charge only giving about an hour of play.  pro tip: our expert player said that people who wanted to play for more than an hour took chargers and chargepacks with them.
• it was noted with interest that Ingress populates Google’s Field Trip app with geolocated content – a nice (and probably enitrely intentional) side effect for Google
• we had a geocacher who updated me that geocaching has moved on to mobile – he said it was a great way to make transient, fun social connections via a shared goal
• we had several Zombie’s Run! users, there was debate about whether it was really a location-based game (answer = probably not), many commented on its simplicity and lack of features but despite that, it had got several people back into running and was very atmospheric (in a scary way) – running alone on the moors or in a forest to the sound track of zombie pursuit was frightening
• one player played a game at the British Museum, then realised he was ignoring the richness around him, which
• the use of maps as a platform for games was seen by some as reductive and limiting – because of the cultural preconceptions about what abstractions the maps should support – and because of it inability to capture some important features (think “Edinburgh”) – though clearly also a huge enabler

People also recommended I check out:

• Arcade Fire’s use of Google Maps and HTML 5 for their customised video soundtrack
• MotiRoti
• Haunted Planet
• Blast Theory’s Fixing point
• Amblr’s work on delivering “geo-located audio-visual experiences through mobile devices” (which is a quote from their graphic designer)

More than a handful of people were making their own location-based games, of various styles and flavours, one based on Google StreetView, nobody mentioned insurmountable technological hassles, but someone mentioned it would be nice to have a WordPress for location-based games.   Tool-wise, people mentioned ConductRR’s transmedia story telling app as a facilitator for cross-media content.

So, enough to be getting on with for the moment.    Thanks everyone!!

Location-based games: where are we now and where are we going?

Lucky me, I’m speaking about opportunities in location-based games @developconf coming up rather, er,  rapidly in early July.  Since I like my content to be fresh I haven’t worked out exactly what I’m going to say.    But I like figuring stuff out so bring on the fun.

I’m interested in learning as much as I can reasonably expect to about (a) nifty examples (b) pain points for building (c) evolution of enabling techology & services (d) the changing shape of the design space (e) stuff that hasn’t worked (f) commercial models.

Here are some things people tell me I should look at:

• Ingress
• Zombies Run, Zombies Run 2
• Scramboo’s games
• Geosophic
• http://geoguessr.com/
• Spywars – (currently on Kickstarter)
• Gowalla – acq-hired by FB, and shut down
• survivalthegame.com
• your idea here…

Newsflash – more great suggestions May 18th from my fellow un-conferencers at Gamecamp.   Deserves a separate post and gets it here.

I’m onto it!  And Google’s shiny GoogleI/O conference keynotes gave me some extra things to think about too.

If you know stuff I should know about – tell me.  Your name in lights for my DevelopConf credits roll.  And here:

Thanks, in alphabetical order,  AJ Glaser,  Anthony Applebee,  Byron Atkinson,  David Nattriss,  Daniel Doherty,  James Turner, Owen Blacker,  Pablo Valcarel ,  Scramboo,   Tanausú Cerdeña, Todd Chaffee,  YOU – YOUR NAME HERE.

Happy to chat.  Happy to share what I’ve learned.   Drop me a comment or msg me @HAStark on twitter or LI or FB.

Facebook Graph Search: I got it, I even queried the author – but I don’t get it yet

Facebook’s new graph search is in closed beta at the moment.  I managed to hurl myself onto it  before the door shut.   I played around with it for a while, then I stopped, waiting for inspiration about how to make it as interesting for me as I was sure it was going to be.  I  haven’t figured it out yet.   So when I saw that the lead engineer from Graph Search, Kari Lee, was giving a Facebook Tech Talk this evening at Facebook’s London office, I hurled myself at the guest list, and squished myself on before the door shut.

My problem is not that I’m uninterested in graph search.  I think it’s fascinating.  Honest.  I even know more than a bit about it, and I still think it’s fascinating.   And I am convinced that for Facebook, the potential here is huge.  Beyond huge.  I am pre-sold on that.   It’s just that, as currently constituted, Facebook’s beta version doesn’t do anything for me.   I do wonder occasionally what I should ask of it.  And fail to engage myself.  Then I try not to be parochial and I think of myself as not being myself, but being at different life stages, doing and wanting different things.  So far, it hasn’t helped.

Facebook’s graph search icon

Facebook’s previous version of search was awful.   I blamed this on Bing, rightly or wrongly.  So, with graph search, I was looking forward to seeing something that shone a headlamp into the murk of the future, even if it what was illuminated wasn’t already a polished jewel.

The content of the talk this evening focussed almost entirely on the natural language processing done by the query constructor, which is impressively free form, and does a lot of “search ahead”, which, given the nature of the data it is trying to reach, is not trivial.  It’s all also updated in real time.   A lot of heavy lifting had clearly been done: they showed a picture of Kari’s team fillling up a massive “statement” staircase.  Mention was also made of how the indexes were stored.  I did wonder how much sense the talk made to much of the audience, as the majority had not been able to cram themselves onto the beta – possibly because they were ineligible as they spoke UK-english, which is not yet supported.  (I’m not sure how or why FB inferred that I spoke US English as one of my dialects.)

Kari went into considerable detail about their strategy and approach for query NLP and UI.  But, to my mind, the talk wasn’t about graph search.   I really thought it was about a front end to graph search.  I asked her about this, as best I could.  I thought she was treating the problem as if it was entirely about query resolution, and the problem ended there.  She answered that what she did was the parser, and that was what she talked about.   Which was certainly a straightforward and honest answer, but it left me feeling rather puzzled.  I think the good bit’s the next bit.  And by that I do not mean the cleverness of how it’s all distributed.   I mean what it does.

Facebook clearly are into graphs from an algorithmic perspective.   That was, in a way, the subject of their recent Kaggle competition which they are using to try to hire more data scientists.  So my bet is that someone, somewhere inside Facebook is thinking about it.  It just hasn’t been surfaced yet.   Graph search, as it was presented this evening,  is already being used internally in Facebook, in two products (ie. services) currently in development.    So we’ll see more of it.   Perhaps what it most needs is a context.  So I look forward to seeing more about how that develops.

[You may have noticed a recent blog theme of "stuff I see while wandering around London at night".   (You'd be right...:-)]