Capture the Flag

Today I started a discussion on 38Minutes called International Capture the Flag ARG. With a radius of 10 km, you should probably aim for 20 flags and maybe up to 10 players. With a radius of 5000 km, you’d probably only want 20-50 flags and maybe 100 players. The idea is that games can work … Continue reading “Capture the Flag”

Today I started a discussion on 38Minutes called International Capture the Flag ARG.

With a radius of 10 km, you should probably aim for 20 flags and maybe up to 10 players. With a radius of 5000 km, you’d probably only want 20-50 flags and maybe 100 players. The idea is that games can work globally – the only needs would be a GPS-enabled smartphone (smart enough to run the client). Players should be divided into teams and the web site for the game should provide an overview of the flags in real time.

It’s not an FPS, it’s just a Capture the Flag. you go to the location and hit update. The client tags your location and sends it to the server. Bing, you have the flag. Note, the flag location is just going to be based in LONG/LAT so some locations might be harder to achieve than others (ie, middle of a private estate, in a hospital). The GPS location needs to be fuzzy – because GPS not work so well indoors 🙂

If two people update in the same time period (say, 5 minutes?) then the flag should go GREY on the map until they’ve timed out (5 mins?) and one goes back to reclaim it.

To be honest, this is a casual game. The server would host (and maybe send out) daily reports on the number of flags captured

Alternate Reality Gaming Flags

Alternate Reality Games really give me a buzz. I’m not 100% sure how they make money (it could be the dreaded advertising).

Simon Meek asks: What are you thinking the pay off will be? And where will the community needed for it come from?

I haven’t worked a lot of that out yet. A lot of this I’m assuming will come from good design, a great interface and the expansion of local games. To sweeten the pie, wouldn’t you dedicate any sales of the client (yeah, sell it, why not?)

The game only works if you convince others to play and only gets interesting when there’s lots of people doing stuff so updates need to be relatively frequent (ooh, tie it into a Twitter ID which broadcasts updates, I like it!). By itself it should be relatively viral.

SineWaveSpeech

Fascinating page about perceptual pop-out when applied to images and sound. I have no idea how this will help me in the future but sine-wave sound seems to me to be an excellent way of trivially encoding something. This means you can have a low bar to entry but at the same time keep the … Continue reading “SineWaveSpeech”

Fascinating page about perceptual pop-out when applied to images and sound.

I have no idea how this will help me in the future but sine-wave sound seems to me to be an excellent way of trivially encoding something. This means you can have a low bar to entry but at the same time keep the trivial onlooker bewildered.

Here’s some more.