Aaron Parecki created a visualization of the territory captured by each team during gameplay. Below is a visualization of the GPS trails of the players during the games. Each dot represents a snapshot of the position of each player taken every 1-10 seconds.
Some of the players experienced interesting events, such as seeing a marching band with Stanford students dressed as pine trees play on campus. Another player found something even more interesting:
Final Game Results
Again, red completely won over blue! It was an epic battle filled with kids and bikes and many points.
You can see a replay of the games in the video below!
Want to bring a game to your school or company? Contact us at mapattack at geoloqi dot com or here and we’ll be glad to help you out! You can also follow @playmapattack on Twitter for the latest games and news! We’ll be bringing it to more campuses and cities starting in June 2011.
Giant Thanks!
Again, giant thanks to Aaron Parecki and Kyle Drake for development and Patrick Arlt for design. Enormous thanks to Reid Beels and Audrey Eschright for helping keep the server stable during Friday’s game! Making a game like this has been a dream of mine since WhereCamp Portland 2008. It’s great to see it come to life!
This morning a bunch of us at WhereCamp headed out to play MapAttack, a game based on the Geoloqi platform. Players subscribed to the MapAttack layer in the Geoloqi app and were assigned to a red or blue team.
The game quickly progressed as people rushed out to collect dots. Some, riding on bikes, grabbed points faster than others. Others, like @paigesaez, aimed for large points, finding and capturing 50 point dots before anyone else.
Mobile App
Here’s what the MapAttack game looked like on the phone. The leaderboard updated in real time, and everyone’s locations and movements could be seen. The fierce battle between red and blue teams progressed over time.
A Rush to the Finish
Red dominated in the lead over Blue through most of the game.
One of the players who got most of the red team’s points on the map told us a story of how one of the points was stuck in the middle of a construction site. He went up the construction worked and asked him if he could carry the phone into the site and hold it there until the point was received. That led to an interesting discussion on real-life apps and games between him and the worker. Had he not been playing the game, he would not have had the conversation or even talked to the worker.
@mpanighetti and @aaronpk went out to draw the word Where on a part of the Stanford University campus. They cranked up the tracker and ran around in the shape of the word.
There have been a bunch of pieces of GPS art created with the Geoloqi app. If you have one, send it to us at art at geoloqi dot com! We’ll put it up in a gallery in the future! Thanks a bunch!
Thanks to everyone who played and worked on the app. We can’t wait to improve it and bring it to more people! You can keep up on future games by following @playmapattack.
MapAttack is a real-time location-based GPS game running on the @geoloqi platform. Coming to a city near you.
Behind MapAttack is Geoloqi’s powerful location-messaging platform and our new gaming platform that can scale up to handle hundreds of thousands of parallel users.
Why MapAttack?
So you can turn the real world into a game, of course! To get to run around while doing awesome things and have fun! The feeling while playing a real-life game is one of the best things on earth. It’s not common, but it’s becoming an increasingly awesome possibility with mobile technology. We hope millions of these games occur and that we can make more of them possible. We’re always inspired by Jane McGonigal and AreaCode and we’d like to increase our ability to bring more people into real-world gaming.
We did the first beta test of MapAttack at the Park Blocks in downtown Portland, Oregon today. As you can see, the map was filled with dots of various values, all of which were quickly eaten:
Thanks so much to Pat Arlt for the excellent design and CSS for this gamemap. The map intelligently shrinks and grows based on browser-window size. Check it out!
Some of the MapAttack players!
Last minute bug fixing…
Aaron Parecki and Kyle Drake furiously worked on a last-minute OAuth2 issue before everyone could join. This lightning-fast park bench programming is brought to you by tethered Android phones!
The experience of playing MapAttack was a unique one. Similar to playing Pac Manhattan at WhereCamp Portland in 2008, the Park Blocks and Pearl District became something more than just a series of streets. When the game was running we were all motivated to explore and gather points by a very different drive than simply walking down the street. It was a completely wonderful and intense feeling.
How a real-life game feels can’t be fully described unless you have played a real-time alternate reality game. There’s something behind these types of experiences, and that’s why it’s been so exciting to build this type of game.
Video
Here’s a short video of @caseorganic explaining the game. Thanks to Sam Churchill of dailywireless.org for taking the video on our first day of testing!
What Next? MapAttack at WhereCamp and Colombia!
After we speak at Where2.0 next week, we’ll be bringing the game to Stanford University where we’ll be bringing MapAttack to WhereCamp. Our first international remote game will be in Medellín, Colombia later this summer.
There’s going to be a lot more!
You can follow MapAttack on Twitter for updates and if you’d like to ask us questions about how to use the platform to make your own games. We’ll have a game-editor and game system set up after we get back from Stanford! See you soon!
Thanks a ton!
Giant enormous thanks go to Aaron Parecki, Kyle Drake and Pat Arlt for making this game come to life. Want MapAttack in your city? Let us know below!
If you’re a food cart, tour group, cyclist, canvasser, or any other type of person who might benefit from sharing your location, you can now embed a Geoloqi map on your site!
Here’s how to do it!
Embedding a Geoloqi Map on your site or blog
Go to your map screen in Geoloqi and click on the “Share Link”.
When the link is created, click on the embed icon </> to the right of the link.
The embed code will automatically be created! You can customize the size by any sort of pixels you’d like. To include a live updating map on your site, simply copy and paste the embed code into your HTML!
Embedding a map into a WordPress page or blog post is easy. Note that you can only embed Geoloqi maps into your own hosted WordPress website and not a wordpress.org site. Simply click on the HTML button in your post editor and paste in the embed code. You can change the dimensions in code if you’d like your map to be larger or smaller.
When you publish your post you’ll see your map! Visitors to your site will be able to watch you in real time. If you turn off your tracker they won’t be able to see your location anymore!
Embed a Map into a WordPress Widget!
To embed a map into a WordPress widget, simply copy and paste the embed code into the widget editor in your WordPress account or site. Click “Save” and load your site to see the map!
Here’s what a sample Geoloqi map in a side widget on a WordPress site:
Privacy
Worried about privacy? Don’t worry, when you turn off the Geoloqi tracker the map will turn blank and won’t show your current location.
Enjoy using Geoloqi! If you embed a map in your site let us know! We’d love to see it.
We quickly realized that we could use the Geoloqi API to build a local emergency alerter app that could run on almost any platform. In the span of around 5 hours (plus about 4 hours getting the Geoloqi API ready), we built ChatterCast, a app allowing one to subscribe to XML feeds based on one’s location. We used the Geonote methods of the Geoloqi API to handle delivering the location-specific messages. Geoloqi used Tropo to deliver SMS messages to the phone.
We finished with just enough time to present before we had to catch our train back to Portland. We had to leave before we were able to see many of the other presenters. We caught about half of a great presentation by Portland geohackers and open gov enthusiasts Reid Beels and Max Ogden. Their app notified users the day before events happened in user-specified ‘watch zones’, e.g. road closures on your commute. They won for best use of Tropo, another success for Portland’s open government community!
Note that the app is simply a proof of concept. While it fully works, it requires installing Instamapper on your mobile phone. Instamapper runs on most mobile phones, including some older Motorola models such as the Boost Mobile phone. This means that even some users with older phones can still have access to this data with ChatterCast. If you’re unfamiliar with Instamapper, we wrote a post on it here.
We had a great time building this app! Now we have a framework for digital storytelling and geolocal data. Anyone can use Tropo, Instamapper and the Geoloqi API to build their own app capable of pushing XML data to a user by SMS. We’ll be integrating ChatterCast into the Geoloqi API so that the mashup can be more accessible to developers and end users.
For more about Geoloqi, and to sign up to beta test, see Geoloqi.com. If you’d like to contribute as a developer, check out the Developer Wiki. To use the rapidly developing API, try the Geoloqi API!
