Walking with strangers
How to play when there is no one else around
At the very minute I am writing this, there is people playing GPS-Mission in Malaysia (2), Brazil, the Netherlands (3), the Russian Federation (2), the USA, Sweden, India, Oman, Germany (2), the United Kingdom (2), Georgia, the Maldives and Canada as I can see on the active players animation on the website. That´s an impressive international bunch of people. But the closest player to my current location is about 230 km away from me.
Stuart Dredge (pocketgamer.biz) has written an insightful post concerning location-based games asking "What if nobody else in my location is playing?". In location-based gaming this is perceived as a problem, because most people think of them as games people are playing against each other in their real-world location, Dredge argues.
One suggestion Dredge comes up with is to look for ways to virtually overlay far away locations with each other, creating a well-populated gameworld. So I could run around in Constance, chasing someone in Karlsruhe or New York. Another advice he gives is not only to think of location-based games as real-time multiplayer games. Both seem important notes on the topic to me.
GPS-Mission is not a real-time multiplayer game. This is why anyone can play it anywhere AND anytime, even if there is no other players around. One can go out to collect gold that is generated close to ones location automatically every time one starts the program. But beyond this "simple" level there is also ways to engage with other players. One can create a mission for others to solve or solve a mission someone else has created. This kind of interplay doesn´t need the players to be in the same location at the same time. Maybe the mission was created months ago, it will be ready to be played anytime after.
But what if I am the only one creating missions in my home area?
Like others of the Orbster team I have been creating missions at places I´ve never been to. This of course is something different to creating a mission being on location, or at least being well familiar with the location. But with the internet, satellite pictures, openstreetmap and geotagged photos a lot of information are at hand. And actually inventing missions in foreign places can be a fun thing to do, a rather special kind of armchair travel, placing symbols on a map making strangers walk to these places or even take pictures of them.
So maybe designing missions for far away players could become part of the game. In the "walk with me" series (so far in Mumbai, Denver, Carbondale, Winniepeg and Calgary) I am trying to encourage people to place me a mission in return, so maybe a ping pong could start, becoming some sort of GPS-connected penpals. I am curious to see what´s going to happen.