Playing Cops and Robbers
in Bremen
(parking deck as playground)
If you take a look at the GPS-Mission map of Bremen, you´ll find quite a few missions that either make you play a gangster or a police officer.
Most of them have been created by the students I worked with over there. To see the city from a criminal´s perspective was a concept many of the groups came up with, when I asked them to design a mission for the first time. A perspective probably inspired by computer games. So we moved through Bremen robbing banks, collecting money for the mafia or being pushed around by our gangster boss.
The next assignment was to create a location-based mystery, a story that begins with some mysteries to be solved. With little surprise this turned out into a lot of missions that take the player to places of imaginary murder making him find clues and solve "whodunit".
When working with the wherigo builder, which allows to code a time limit, planting and deactivating imaginary bombs became an issue as well. Parking decks turned out to be a perfect setting for many of these games, offering a somewhat seedy atmosphere as well as providing an open space with great views and good reception in the middle of the city.
For one group of students all this playing cops and robbers suddenly stopped being a game. When running around on a parking deck two real police officers turned up, asking for their papers. Two of them had non-german passports which seemed to make them even more suspicious to the police men who thought they were stealing cars. A police car turned up and they were almost arrested. Only when two more students with GPS devices arrived they finally believed that this was just a game and let everybody go.