Tools & Toys: Location, Location, Location

It’s a drizzly Sunday in MarymoorPark, a leafy hangout for soccerkids and Ultimate Frisbee jocks, inRedmond, Wash. This afternoon,however, a new breed of outdoorenthusiasts has taken to the field.

A half-dozen people are wan-dering the grounds while holdingtheir cellphones at arm’s length.They move in urgent and idio-

syncratic trajectories, shifting directionson the fly without peeling their eyesfrom their phones. For the drivers onthe highway nearby, itis an unusual sight:a group of oddballsapparently roaming inthe rain for reception[see photo, “Offthe Couch”]. But, infact, the wanderersare not muttering,“Can you hearme now?” They’replaying Raygun.

The conceit is thatyou’re hunting forghosts. The phonedisplays a sort ofsupernatural radarscreen that trackssurrounding ghostsas tiny colored dots.The object is to gob-ble up the dots beforethey get you. In away, it’s a little likePac-Man, but with one key difference,as James Robarts of GloVentures LLC,in Redmond, Wash., the developers ofthe game, puts it: “The joystick is you.”

Raygun is one of the first so-calledlocation-based games. Played witha mobile device such as a cellphone or aPDA, it uses Global Positioning System(GPS) technology to transform the realworld into a virtual arena. It’s a videogame that can actually make you sweat.

It also represents the bleeding edgeof a bleeding new culture and industry:mobile games, which brought inUS $72 million in the United States in2004 and are expected to boom to

$430 million by 2009. So far, mostmobile games have been Lilliputian ap-proximations of the stuff players findon a PlayStation or a PC—Tetris, videopoker, and the like.

Location-based games are boldly go-ing where no games have gone before:to the cold, wet fields of reality. Theyaim to transform not only the way peo-ple conceive of electronic games but theway they experience them.

“We’re big fans of the real world,”says Robarts with a grin, as rain drips

from his cap on the sideline of theMarymoor field. “Our goal is to getgamers out into it.”

“Let’s go out in the cul-de-sac andplay Snake!” Robarts exclaims, as hegrabs his Pocket PC. It’s a few hoursafter the rainy Raygun play out in thepark, and we’ve retired to his house.But now the clouds over Redmondhave parted to reveal a picture-perfectday. And he’s going to enjoy it in theway he likes best: playing a location-based game.

Robarts, a lanky 47-year-old, standsin the center of the street and boots uphis handheld. The game is a GPS version G

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LOCATION, LOCATION,LOCATIONGPS games get players off their couches

and into the real world BY DAVID KUSHNER

OFF THE COUCH: Location-based games require exercise.

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of the popular video game Snake, inwhich the player must navigate anever-elongating reptile around a seriesof obstacles on-screen. Easy to learnbut difficult to master, the traditionalversion of Snake has become anevergreen title for both cellphonesand PCs. But no one has played Snakequite like this.

When Robarts activates the game,the software displays geographic

coordinates that act as the boundariesand obstacles of the game. The PocketPC, which includes a GPS chip, keepstrack of Robarts’s position. Every fewsteps he takes—roughly every second—the change in position is logged, and theimage of the snake on the Pocket PCscreen is refreshed. So instead ofwiggling a joystick to maneuver theserpent, Robarts simply has to maneuverhimself. He demonstrates by jogging ina broad arc, and his snake followsalong. “I do this twice a day,” he says,between breaths. “It’s my aerobics!”

Robarts’s title at GloVentures isdirector of dreams, and his dream oflocation-based games has been a longtime coming to fruition. “Innovation ismy life,” he says. As an Eagle Scout inthe 1970s, Robarts participated in the

U.S. government’s Mentally GiftedMinors program, a Cold War projectmeant to train future rocket scientists.Later, while working on creatingguidance systems for cruise missiles,Robarts learned a valuable lesson forany aspiring engineer. “Problems don’tget solved by a bolt from the blue,” hesays. “You have to deliberately workthrough them to get to the magic.”

That understanding served him wellduring his earlywork on location-based games. Afterstints at variousjobs, including oneat Microsoft’s

Advanced Consumer Device Group,which was working on moving theWindows operating system from theoffice to the living room, Robarts joineda start-up devoted to wearable com-puting. The software the companydeveloped included a tracking element,which Robarts thought might haveentertainment applications. So he tookhis co-workers to Mexico in 1999 to testout what he loosely calls “a GPS-awaretravel guide wrapped in a scavengertreasure hunt.”

Though fun, the high-tech roadrally revealed an inherent challengeof location-based games: latency.Because the software relies on trian-gulating the faraway GPS satellites fortracking, the action is not in real time.Today, even with the GPS chip set

64 IEEE Spectrum | January 2006 | NA www.spectrum.ieee.org

“It’s a rich narrative device.These things could be aroundyou, but you’re not aware of it.”

being monitored every second, there’sstill a 5- or 6-second delay beforechanges in position show up. Ratherthan fight against the technology,Robarts and his team chose to incor-porate that into the challenge. “Youcan’t turn without experiencing lag,”he says, “so that’s part of the game.”

In 2002, Robarts and CesarAlvarez, a former colleague fromMicrosoft, launched Glofun as adivision of GloVentures to pursue thisnew form of gaming full-time. Insteadof the scavenger hunts Roberts hadtried in Mexico, the team exploredmore narrative-based games, whichRobarts describes as “Myst in the realworld.” Myst, one of the best-sellinggames of all time, allows players toexplore a fantasy world and solveintricate puzzles.

In Robarts’s version, locations wouldbe pinpointed on the GPS system sothat when the gamer arrived there,the device would display clues,dialogue, or character information.For example, a player might wander outinto the woods to find a ghost at onelocation, whose story would lead toanother location.

As in the pioneer days of PC gam-ing, Glofun’s early experiments wererife with mishaps and misadventures.Misplaced navigational points hadsome intrepid gamers literally wadingout into Seattle’s chilly waters, withtheir Pocket PCs hoisted high abovetheir heads. “We were crossingstreets of traffic,” Robarts recalls,“and we said, ‘This is bad.’ ”

To avoid broken limbs or worse,Glofun reduced the boundaries of thegames to something more manageable,such as a soccer field. The companyrelies on the GPS chip set built intocertain phones, such as the Nextel i710and i730.

The effect fulfills Glofun’s goal ofblurring the line between fantasy andreality. “We like ghosts [in our games],”Robarts says. “It’s a rich narrativedevice. These things could be aroundyou, but you’re not aware of it.” That is,until you pick up the phone. �

ABOUT THE AUTHORDAVID KUSHNER, a journalist in NewJersey, is the author of Johnny Magicand the Card Shark Kids (RandomHouse, 2005).

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Tools & Toys: Location, Location, Location