Virtual Mushrooms
Designing landscape-specific missions
The point of GPS-based games is that it involves the players movement.
There are site-specific games like GPS mission, where the player has to go to a very specific location on earth. The places the player visits while playing are part of the game. Maybe the game tells a story that is set in these places or makes the player solve riddles on location. Sometimes there even is a little „treasure“ hidden at this very location as it is known from Geocaching .
Other GPS-Games are „locationless“ - a category I borrow from the WherIgo-Builder. It doesn´t mean that you don´t move at all playing it but that the game is not made for a specific location. It can be games like ParkourPro where your movement has to form a geometrical shape. You could play this anywhere (although there will be places where it is easier and places where it is much harder). It can also be multiplayer games like fastfoot where the display of the GPS device shows where other players are located and players have to chase each other.
Actually playing GPS mission not following a mission but just collecting gold in a way is a locationless game, too. You can play it anywhere. Although it makes you go to very specific spots where virtual gold is located these spots are chosen randomly. There is no site-specific aspect to it.
Designing missions I was thinking about how to create missions that can be played at more than just one location but still are somewhat site-specific. One idea I came up with is the „Virtual Mushrooms“. The concept is quite simple: The mission takes the player on a walk through the woods. At each waypoint he finds a mushroom (shown on the display). He then has to decide whether to take or leave it. Taking poisonous mushrooms, of course, is a mistake. After deciding the player will get some information on the mushroom he just found.
Instead of being locationless or site-specific in a strong sense one could maybe call this mission landscape-specific. The theme of the mission (collecting mushrooms) goes with the type of landscape (woods) it is placed in. It can´t just be placed anywhere but still is not on one specific location.
So far there is virtual mushrooms blooming in Constance , Karlsruhe and Munich. I was able to choose a nice wood and a nice route I know for the version in my home town Constance. Placing the same mission in Munich and Karlsruhe, where I have never been for a walk in the woods, was another thing. Actually it was quite fun looking for a wood that seems appropriate via satellite images and knowing that this will make some people go there. While I was very gentle in the beginning, placing the mushrooms just along the way, I started making it a bit trickier designing the Karlsruhe version. There were all these interesting looking clearances and I thought that these would make a lovely scenery for the mushrooms and also make players leave their normal pathways.
After Jörn had played it he told me that one of the mushrooms was placed on a training parcour for dogs with fences around it and evil looking German sheperds running around. Luckily he still could reach the point without jumping over the fence. I wouldn´t want him to be eaten by dogs while collecting virtual mushrooms.
If any of you readers would like a „Virtual-Mushrooms“ mission in a wood close to where you live - just tell me. So far it is in German but I could also do a translation to english. If there is no woods around I can also offer the „virtual Fishes“ option.
