TechWalk = T-Mobile Sidekicks on the Sidewalk

When members of Birmingham’s creative workforce take over their downtown city sidewalks for TechWalk this coming Saturday (September 24, 2005), they’ll be using one of the coolest personal communications devices on the market for a game that blends technology with street theater. Just in time for Birmingham’s first large-scale urban game event, T-Mobile has become the official technology provider to TechWalk. Each team will play the game of “Urban Othello” with the T-Mobile Sidekick® II device, provided free of charge by T-Mobile for use in the game.

Urban Othello is run like Othello, a strategy game played on an 8×8 board, using discs that are black on one side and white on the other. Since Urban Othello is played outdoors on the city sidewalks, the board size has been reduced to a 6×6 grid. In the board game, each move is made by placing a disc on the board and flipping other discs to the team’s color. For Urban Othello, the discs are played virtually through a website and viewed by the players via the Sidekick’s web browser.

Since the TechWalk event is staged in concert with the 7th Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, placing the team’s disc will involve improvisational performances. Teams must first physically get themselves to the intersection of downtown Birmingham represented on the 6×6 game grid. Once there, they will be presented with a game challenge comprised of three words or phrases. A random set of props, actions, and wild cards will be displayed on the Sidekick screen. The team will be given a limited time to improvise a scene representing all the provided challenges and capture that scene with the Sidekick’s built-in camera phone. Once a TechWalk judge accepts the digital image as satisfying the challenge, the game piece will be awarded and the opposing team will be given up to four minutes to play their turn. The game will continue until one team dominates the board or until the time limit is exceeded.

Urban Othello is modeled after past large-scale urban games conducted in other such great cities as London, New York, and San Francisco. The game played in Birmingham borrows heavily on components of two New York-based games, Fiasco and Gridlockd!, as projects of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Fiasco, otherwise known as Digital Street Game, is a game designed by Michele Chang of Intel Corporation’s People & Practices Research Group and improved by Elizabeth Goodman of Confectious Design. The challenges of Fiasco inspired the performance aspect of Urban Othello. Gridlockd! is a game recently designed by Mohit SantRam. The idea of playing a game of Othello on the city-based game board was inspired by SantRam’s Gridlockd!.

TechWalk is organized by TechBirmingham, a not-for-profit entity focused on growing Birmingham, Alabama’s technology economy.