mattw.fn_blog()

Tonight’s HackNight was a lot of fun. A bunch of us got to check out a demo of the new GloFun game. In a nutshell, it’s a location aware (GPS) game where you run around collecting virtual stuff. In reality, it’s much more interesting than it sounds.

The game currently runs on a PDA with a bluetooth GPS, but future versions will run on a GPS enabled phone (soon to be standard equipment due to E-911). The backstory is supernatural in nature, with you being some sort of ghostbuster. Your mission is to run around with your device, a vacuum powered ghost radar stun machine, and collect the ghosts that are all around us. Surprisingly addictive, we found ourselves running around the park at South Lake Union, collecting our ghosts and scaring the geese. Fully immersed in the game, you don’t notice onlookers or water fowl, but concentrate on finding and grabbing all of the ghosts with your somewhat rudimentary ghost buster tool. I thought I was doing well with my score of 8.2 minutes, but Casey totally put me in my place by beating my score by two minutes (I apparently didn’t run enough).

After all of this, there was a question and answer session over drinks at the Rocksalt. Our responses were positive, even with the simple graphics, but we all thought it belonged on a phone rather than a PDA or custom device. This is of course, the idea behind the company, and the whole thing is covered by many patents.

I like these guys, and I think they’ve got a future, but I have to wonder if there’s any prior art out there. I’ve been hearing about location based games for quite some time now, but I think they may have a case the way they’ve worded things (read the patents). What do you folks think?