We completed the first beta test yesterday on one of the Operation Rendition missions. (Big props to Andy and Steven for all your help!)

 While I discovered a few things that would make the actual missions better, there are also a few things that I can do to make testing easier.

1. Start as early as possible. getting a jump on the day just means you won’t be burning daylight at the end (like we were.)
2. Use multiple phones when possible. Because the missions are paired (two happen at the same time with the same landmarks but different teams) it makes tweaking the waypoints easier.
3. Make sure that everyone has a fully charged phone before you start so that they can be used in real-time. Nothing is worse than having a phone go dead.
4. Make heavy allowances for travel and parking time. Sure it was downtown SF the Saturday before Christmas, and next week it will be a ghost town, but I really underestimated. I guess I’m spoiled by Caltrain and my bike. They are arguably the two quickest ways to get to the city and then to get around when you are there.

All in all, it was very illuminating seeing the missions on a real iPhone for the first time. It was pretty dang exciting seeing my work out there in public, even if we were the only ones reading it. It was the best hour that I’ve spent on Jericho in years, even if we only got one  hour logged. I got a smile from ear to ear just thinking about now.

More testing in the next 6 weeks!

As for the missions, I’ll be making small changes and republishing them today.

—Bru

I can’t remember why but I had been reading about geocaching long before I had even contemplated getting a GPS enabled device. The concept seemed to be lacking a little something and the potential for utterly failing to find the tiny boxes that may or may not still be in the advertised locations seemed high. However, I liked the community aspect and I’ve always been fond of walking and exploring new areas so I thought it would be cool to add a point to that. As I read more about location based gaming – including some of the ‘assassin’ type gps enabled events – I stumbled on a spin-off of geocaching that involved downloading scenarios to your gps device to trigger context based riddles, challenges, story prompts etc. This seemed a lot more conceptually exciting; turning exploration of a city or a park into mini roleplay adventures – more colourful than geocaching, less lame than LARPS. Unfortunately, it essentially required upgrading the software on a dedicated handheld gps device – something I was never going to own.

While geocaching, which simply sees you input coordinates and then go to them, seemed an archaic pastime as compared to a LBG, in which the device actually responds and reacts to your physical location. I’ll confess that knowing there was a geocaching app on the iPhone was one of the secret nerd reasons that I went for an iPhone over an ipod touch. When I had my iPhone and discovered that the geocache app was £5.99 for what was essentially just a list of gps coordinates and another map program. Searching the app store for something else related to gps games yielded the free and far superior GPS Mission.

GPS missions are checkpoint-to-checkpoint tours and adventures. Physically reaching (getting within 20 metres) a checkpoint will display a picture, a message and sometimes a riddle/question that must be completed before the next checkpoint will appear. The missions also contain gold to ‘collect’ as well as photo points, which prompt you to take a photo and upload it to the mission profile on the website for all to see. The only value of gold is to ‘buy’ trophies that are made available on completion of missions and as a measure of your overall ‘score’, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can also upload photo ‘waymarks’ of areas of interest to be viewed by other players.

The best thing about GPS mission is that the missions are mostly user generated and this means that as long as you live near a major urban centre, the chances are you are within a reasonable distance of some diverse kinds of missions.

The first mission I did was a story-based, kind of spy mission. It involved lots of text at each checkpoint to progress the story with riddles and even gold placement that explicitly related to the narrative. Picture points prompted us to record suspicious activity (outside the MI5 building no less) adding to the immersion. While Chris and I naturally didn’t take it too seriously we couldn’t help but admire the effort that had evidently gone into making it. A couple of days later I received a message through my GPS mission website account, in character, prompting me to go to a local bookshop and take a picture of a certain book and upload it as a waymark ‘to prove that the channels of communication were safe’. After this was done I was given the password, necessary to complete a second mission – part 2 of the still ongoing saga.

Another mission, “Shoreditch Street Art Safari” took myself and some friends on a two-hour stroll around Shoreditch, with each checkpoint and photo point directing us to another stunning piece of street art. Several other missions are strolls round nice areas or historical tours. Today I went mushroom picking in Tunbridge Wells woodland – at each checkpoint the riddle involved judging whether each ‘virtual mushroom’ was edible or not.

The mission editor on the website is straightforward to use, it is a shame this is not useable from the phone – so research and any pictures you need taking needs to be done before you start building the mission at home. I made a ‘Samuel Smith’s pub crawl’ mission, which features a logbook to sign in behind the bar at the final pub (inspired by geocaching).

GPS mission is not a ‘gamers game’. It’s the sort of thing I think you’d either ‘get’ or ‘not get’. I’ve had and am still having a lot of fun with it and I see so much potential – for multiplayer missions with simultaneous checkpoint activation requirements, nonlinear missions and in-game chat. I’ve found the community to be generally very warm and friendly – The mushroom mission was actually made by a woman in Germany for me because there weren’t many missions in Tunbridge Wells, the guy who did the Street Art Safari signed my logbook. And they are working hard on updating it – the latest iPhone update for the app arrived at the end of March, drastically improving stability and usability. A recent event in the UK saw the placing of five massive gold stashes that vanish once somebody gets them as an effort to explore some competitive play. Because it takes place in (or at least overlaid onto) the real world, it’s a game that gives you stories to tell, stories that are colourful, funny and interesting to people that don’t play the game – and how many games can you say that about?

It’s available for iPhone, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile phones with internal or external GPS devices. Sadly, no Android support as of yet, but I daresay that’s only around the corner. As the mission editor gets more sophisticated, this game is only going to get better and become an even richer experience for a wide variety of audiences. I was tempted to give this game of the week two weeks running, it so captured my imagination.

Hoffentlich arbeiten die fleissigen Programmierer bei Groundspeak gerade wild daran, denn es gibt für’s iPhone, und diverse andere GPS Telefone, eine Applikation, die sich GPS-Mission nennt.

Das Spielprinzip ist das gleiche.

Der “Mission-Builder” ist im Gegensatz zum “Whereigo Builder” ein wahrer Traum.

Man benötigt keine zusätzliche, plattformabhängige Software und es ist kinderleicht eine Mission zu erstellen.

In Joerns Blog gibt es dazu weitere Informationen.

Nach der Installation und Registrierung ist Fikki wirklich überrascht, denn im Umkreis von 300m gibt es zwei Missionen.

Eine davon ist eine Kneipentour. Bei Schneeregen konnte der Fikki, dank der Otterbox, die Runde absolvieren. Es ist genau wie beim Wherigo, nur daß es funktioniert. Ankommen, Frage beantworten, weiter gehen.

Interessant ist auch der Multiplayer – Modus, in dem man live gegeneinander spielen kann.

In ganz Köln gibt es schon neun Missionen. Das wird sich aber ändern, denn natürlich wird sich der Fikki auch an die Missionserstellung heranwagen.

In der Ausführung steckt auf jeden Fall Potential. Und wenn man GPS-Mission geschickt mit Geocaching verbindet, gibt’s sogar ein Döschen am Finale.

So lassen sich wartungsarme Innenstadt-Multis auslegen, bei denen man nicht dauernd irgendwelches Zeugs zählen muss.

Das Spielprinzip ist sehr interessant.

Fikki in geheimer Mission

The audience and the 9 demo show companies. 

Mobile Monday Demo Night in Munich

It was my first MobileMonday DEMO NIGHT, so I was quite curious what we can expect from the MoMo team Munich this time. At this event 9 companies got the chance to present their product, service or technology in a 5 minutes presentation (without PowerPoint ) and followed by 2 minutes Q&A session from the MobileMonday selected experts like Jarkko Tolvi (Forum NOKIA), Maks Giordano (ProSiebenSat1), Marc Frey (Intellimedia), Olaf Groß (Hightext Verlag), Russell Buckley (AdMob) and Declan Lonergan (Yankee Group).

We had a very entertaining show made by the following companies; netbiscuits, jentro, belysio, BuddyCloud, JFL Video Service, GPS Mission, Kooaba, kimia and Extrajetzt. And the winner of the MobileMonday Germany Demo Night Award this time is… Kooaba.