Article: “Fans will get chance to play at film fest”

The Birmingham Business Journal ran a nice story about our effort in this past Friday’s issue. Click here to read the full text. The story starts off with…

Motorists and pedestrians beware. If you see groups of four to six people behaving bizarrely on downtown Birmingham streetcorners the weekend of Sept. 23, it’s all in good fun.

Birmingham’s Sidewalks Become Digital Playground

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Aug. 25, 2005 — London, New York, San Francisco, and now Birmingham. On Sep. 24, the historic sidewalks of Birmingham’s theatre district will be transformed into a large-scale urban game like those previously staged in several other cities worldwide. The 7th Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival has partnered with TechBirmingham for the TechWalk event, a location-based game blending a wireless internet network, other technology systems, and performance art. Teams will traverse the urban grid of downtown Birmingham, improvising scenes suggested by an online random phrase generator. Digital images of the staged scenes will be uploaded to a server to win street intersections in a game modeled after the popular board game Othello.

“Major cities around the world already host urban games on their city streets,” said Curtis Palmer, president/CEO of TechBirmingham. “Birmingham’s tech-savvy workforce is ready for this type of entertainment and we could not imagine a better time to introduce the game than during the immensely popular Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival.”

The TechWalk game will take place within a six-by-six-block area surrounding most of the Sidewalk festival venues. A map of the zone is available for viewing on the TechWalk website. Teams of 4 to 6 people are encouraged to sign up for this free event by visiting www.TechWalk.org where more details will be provided as the event date approaches.

TechWalk will be staged with the help of recruitment staff from ITAC Solutions. “This is a natural fit for us,” said Chase Morrow, partner and co-founder of the firm. “We are interested in linking Birmingham’s growing technology workforce with all the great employment opportunities that an expanding tech economy brings.”

About Sidewalk:
The Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival is a project of the Alabama Moving Image Association, Inc., a publicly supported 501(c)(3) non-profit organization created to inspire, encourage and support films and filmmaking in Alabama. The festival is set for September 23-25 in Birmingham’s historic theatre district. For more information on the festival, please visit www.SidewalkFest.com.

About TechWalk:
TechWalk is a project of TechBirmingham, a not-for-profit entity focused on growing the Birmingham region’s technology economy. It was formed in 2002 by the community to lead, support, and coordinate the start-up, attraction, growth, retention, and expansion of technology-based businesses, investments, and jobs for the entire Birmingham metropolitan region. For more information on TechBirmingham and its other activities, please visit www.TechBirmingham.org. For more information on TechWalk, please visit www.TechWalk.org. A newsreader Atom.XML feed is available for the TechWalk effort.

Our city streets as the game board for TechWalk

Parks are represented by letters… A is Linn Park and B is Kelly Ingram Park. Festival venues are represented by numbers:

1. Alabama Power
2. Alabama Theatre
3. Birmingham Museum of Art
4. The Brick Room
5. Carver Theatre
6. The Harbert Center / Tech Center
7. Rushton Theatre @ McWane Center
8. Sidewalk Cafe at G
9. McWane Center “Red Carpet” Kids’ Activity

The game will be run from the “Tech Center,” located within the Harbert Center (#6T). Click on the map above for a larger higher-resolution image (600K).

What is TechWalk? / FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions:

• What is TechWalk?
  TechWalk is a large-scale urban game using the physical world of a 6×6 block area of downtown Birmingham, Alabama as a virtual game board. Using wireless technology teams of people will compete in games of Othello, capturing grid intersections by completing a film-themed challenge with a camera phone, by uploading the images to a centralized server. Challenges will be in the form of performance art using a combination of noun, verb, and adjective randomly assigned to the team when they arrive at the intersection. The game will be time-limited so that an overall winner can be determined before the evening’s screenings at Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. The public is invited to observe the game in progress but can also track the progress online via the web.
• How Do You Play?
  16 teams of between 4 and 6 people each are expected to be accommodated in our game. The game board is made up of 36 blocks of downtown Birmingham (2nd Ave N to 7th Ave N and 17th St N to 22nd St N). Using a PDA, the team will determine where they wish to place their virtual token. They will quickly move to that location and request a challenge from the server. Together, all but one of the team members must act out the challenge sequence and the remaining team member will use a camera phone to capture the image and upload it to the server. A moderator will visually inspect the uploaded photograph and award the team’s token to that location. The game is over when all intersections are claimed or if a prescribed time limit has been reached. The winner of the round is determined by the total number of colored tiles placed/captured according to the rules of Othello.
• Technology to be used:
  This game will make use of a wireless network, digital capture devices (camera phones), display devices (PDA), and personal cell phones (for communicating between team members if they send out scouts).
• Challenges:
  Obviously, this is our first attempt at running this game. Wireless network latency may be an issue, but we don’t expect to have to share this network with many others during the event. While we can accomplish the effort with nothing more than walkie-talkies and marshals, we’d like to play the game totally electronically… which will allow us to scale to virtually any number of groups that wish to play the game.
• Why Play?
  This should be a fun, fast-paced game on the city streets. Teams will be pitted against each other in a random manner, intersections on the grid must be claimed within a prescribed time limit, and your team will have to move quickly and travel across up to six city blocks to position your team for the next challenge. What could be more fun?
• Who’s behind TechWalk?
  While TechBirmingham is the lead organizer of the game, several other groups have been engaged to help out. ITAC Solutions is a sponsor of the event and will be helping to manage the logistics. Auburn University’s Urban Studio students and instructors will be studying and documenting the game as part of their assigned curriculum this semester. And, UAB’s GameDev group is creating the Urban Othello game itself.
• Who Created TechWalk?
  This effort is being led by Curtis Palmer of TechBirmingham. It is actually a blend of several different similar efforts undertaken over the past few years primarily in New York City (see our blog posting about large-scale urban games for details). However, none of this could be accomplished without the steering committee members and other volunteers.

Gaming Goes Mobile: Issues and Implications

A new research paper from Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society predicts the emergence of mobile gaming as the “next big thing” for the wireless industry. Here’s the abstract:

A recent report by the telecommunications research firm Analysys predicts that mobile games will replace ringtones, logos and other personalisation services as one of the key drivers of the mobile market. Despite the rapid growth of the mobile gaming market, there appears to have been little critical analysis of this phenomenon. The paper aims to investigate the industrial and social implications of mobile gaming, by bringing together some of the current research on both mobile communications and computer games.

Beginning with a broad overview of the major stakeholders in the market, the paper examines how mobile gaming functions as a vehicle for convergence, bringing together previously disparate industries around a common form of content. It also examines the regulatory complexities that arise when gaming becomes mobile, and in particular how the rise of technologies like location-based services might impact on issues such as privacy.

[ download full article as PDF format ]

Big Games, Big Cities

With Birmingham joining the ranks of cities that host large-scale urban games via TechWalk, we thought it’d be great to show the games by cities and launch dates, rather than a list of just the games as previously posted. This list includes games we’ve found since our original list was created:

• New York City, NY – Digital Street Game (2004), Gridlockd! (2005), Chalk-A-Block (2005), Pac-Manhattan (2004), TAG (2003)
• London/Bristol/Manchester/Cambridge, UK – Uncle Roy All Around You (2004), Noderunner (2003), Pirates! (2000), Can You See Me Now? (2004), CitiTag (2004)
• San Francisco, CA – The Go Game (2001)
• Los Angeles, CA – Pirates! (2000), Close Encounters (2003)
• Minneapolis, MN – Conqwest (2004)
• Denver, CO – Conqwest (2004)
• Seattle, WA – Conqwest (2004)
• Salt Lake City, UT – Conqwest (2004)
• Phoenix, AZ – Conqwest (2004)
• Vancouver, Canada – Navigate the Streets (2005)
• Toronto, Canada – Navigate the Streets (2005), Manhunt (2005)
• Rovaniemi, Finland – Pirates! (2000)
• Rotterdam, Netherlands – Can You See Me Now? (2003)
• Köln, Germany – Can You See Me Now? (2004)
• Barcelona, Spain – Can You See Me Now? (2004)
• Portugal – Undercover (2003)
• Austrailia – I Like Frank (2004)
• Singapore – GunSlingers (2003)
• Tokyo – Can You See Me Now? (2005), Mogi (2003)
• Hong Kong – Undercover (2003)

Did we miss any? We want this list to be as complete and accurate as possible.

Planning Committee meeting this Wednesday

As we prepare for the press conference on Thursday, at which we’ll announce the TechWalk project, we need to get back together and work through some logistics. Please join us at 9am at Highlands Coffee for about an hour. Several committee members will be engaged with the 8am Catalyst Steering Committee meeting, so look for us at the back table up the steps past the counter.

Geeks Without Borders

Check out the story Geeks Without Borders from the Slate ezine. It’s an article from February 2003 which talks about the emergence of large-scale urban games. The quote from Howard Rheingold’s 2002 book, Smart Mobs, almost predicts the emergence of TechWalk (well, it could be the chicken and the egg issue <smile>):

“… the combination of cheap wireless devices, urban density, and teenagers is creating a new model of sidewalk theater.”

Research behind the games

TechWalk takes the best of prior efforts (see urban games entry below) in the field of large-scale urban games and puts it together in a way that we hope will be better in many ways. That said, here are a number of research papers that helped define the TechWalk effort:

• Learning from a FIASCO: Design in Conversation with Social Science Research – 5 pages
• Fiasco: Location-based, physical gameplay with a digital interface – 7 pages
• ‘Created by everybody’: Engaging participation with mobile interfaces – 3 pages
• BYOD: Bring Your Own Device – 8 pages
• Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City – 34 pages
• Pirates: Proximity-Triggered Interaction in a Multi-Player Game – 2 pages
• Pirates! Using the Physical World as a Game Board – 8 pages
• Where On-Line Meets On-The-Streets: Experiences With Mobile Mixed Reality Games – 8 pages
• Savannah: mobile gaming and learning? – 11 pages
• En-Spacing Technology: Some thoughts an the geographical nature of technology – 11 pages
• Presenting Route Instructions on Mobile Devices – 8 pages
• Mobile Learning with a Mobile Game: Technology and Game Dynamics – 19 pages
• Exploiting Physicality: linking action and effect – 1 page
• Underdogs & Superheroes: Designing for New Players in Public Space – 14 pages
• The Error of our Ways: The experience of Self-Reported Position in a Location-Based Game – 18 pages
• Coping with Uncertainty in a Location-Based Game – 8 pages
• OpenTrek: A Platform for Developing Interactive Networked Games on Mobile Devices – 15 pages
• Using Ad Hoc Network Games to support Face-to-Face Interaction in Public Places – 2 pages
• Prototyping Mobile Game Applications: Practical user experiences – 8 pages
• City Elements Create Images in Our Mind – 1 page
• Orchestrating a Mixed Reality Game ‘On the Ground’ – 8 pages

Play Othello Online

You can play Othello via web interface as a way of preparing for TechWalk… see http://www.rainfall.com/othello/. Of course, you could also play the Microsoft Internet Reversi against another live person to get the idea of how the game is played