Big Urban Games…
A couple weeks ago, I attended a brief talk by Rob Glaser, fellow Yalie and founder of Real Networks. When asked where he saw opportunities, Rob outlined two areas.
1. Create businesses that take advantage of the fact that the “net generation” views the online world differently than those who grew up without the internet. i.e. It’s not clear to the older CEO of Viacom why something like MySpace.com would grow so quickly because he would never post all about his life online.
2. Ubiquitous wifi will create new opportunities.
I have a friend who’s business is in the ubiquitous wifi space- Radiuz (kind of a p2p wifi business…) the struggle is the business model.
I’ve been thinking about opportunities that ubiquitous wifi might create. One interesting area is Big Urban Gaming. I’ve seen some ideas around using cell phones and semacodes, but nothing ultra sophisticated.
It seems like there would be really neat opportunities to create games that occur both in the real built environment and online. Especially multplayer games. Obviously, this works best in urban environments, but that’s where our population is centered anyway.
It’ll be interesting to see if in the future, massive multiplayer real world games or “big urban games” catch on. We all may be running around with our cell phones, origami’s or psp’s playing a massive game of capture the flag….
May 18th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Massively multiplayer real world gaming is a thriving and emerging subculture already! Check out alternate reality games, supergaming, and so on… The Go Game, Ilovebees, Last call Poker…
September 5th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Come play our large-scale urban games mid September in NYC and in Birmingham. See www.confluxfestival.org for details about the New York event. Our group is staging the game of Urban Reversi (Othello on the city streets) for the next 3 weekends. See www.TechWalk.org for all the details. Hope you can join us!