Work(ing Title)

Kevin Slavin of Area/Code just wrapped up a really interesting talk about large-scale real-world games. Building on Gregory Trefry’s invitation for us all to Come Out & Play in NYC this September, Kevin illustrated a great point about game design; constraints are the exciting thing because constraints are rules.

“World of Warcraft would be less fun with fewer rules.”

Ongoing games that are played in the real world are probably the most exciting form of entertainment for me. Given the choice between six hours of Xbox Live or a week of Assassin, I’ll take the super soaker and the mark.

If you’ve ever tried to get online directions to your friend’s fresh housing development, it’s a cursed problem. Well Steve Coast wants to put the cartographer back in car. OpenStreetMap is enabling all of us to plug inidivually-collected GPS data traces onto a full world map.

This is a fantastic usage of the wiki concept and it’s the first reason I’ve seen to throw my money down on a GPS device. Obviously I’d prefer my mobile phone to do this work for me, but until the telcos let me I’ll velcro a a Garmen device to my dashboard.

Who better to open the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference than Mike Liebhold from the Institute For The Future. He also is advising Palatial, which is doing interesting things with Google Maps overlays.

Among the pile of information Mike dispensed at maximum speed was the call for a tricorder; a handheld device that aggregates all of the information about the place the device exists. Hopefully one of the tier one companies (listening Windows Mobile?) will get out in front of this, as having the device will help push the demand for the publicly-available data.