Wumpus goes to BOGfest

28/05/2009

Last Saturday saw Brighton's first Outdoor Gaming festival (a.k.a. BOGfest), organised by Richard Vahrman, COO of innovative GPS-gaming company, Locomatrix. The day featured a variety of games, mainly featuring mobile phones, so I thought what better way to contribute than to resurrect the Hunt the Wumpus game that I originally created to demo at Brighton Barcamp back in 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the idea is to navigate around a series of interconnected rooms and to shoot the Wumpus before he eats you, all while avoiding other hazards such as giant bats and bottomless pits. The original 1970s version was entirely text based, but my updated version uses a series of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to represent each room in the maze. Players scan the codes using a camera phone, and are given clues on their telephone handset.

In its first incarnation I printed these codes out on stickers, and created a cave on a roll of wallpaper. For BOGfest, however, I thought it needed to be much bigger, so I regenerated the codes on A3 sheets of paper (all hail OpenOffice, which, because of its XML format, allowed me to automatically generate the document instead of manually inserting all the graphics). I then enlisted the help of my sons to stick these bits of paper on a 10m x 10m area of Hove promenade, and to draw the rooms and tunnels in coloured chalk.

Then it was just a case of helping people get the barcode software running on their phones (or just lending them one of the Cogapp R&D handsets) and letting them get on with it. During the afternoon dozens of people played, and it was fascinating to watch their reactions: everything from extremely skeptical ("what are you selling? How much does it cost to play?") to the extremely enthusiastic ("this is a lovely idea").

If nothing else, it provided another nice example of how QR codes can provide a mapping from a physical to a virtual location, and also how each user can experience a different system, despite the physical tokens remaining the same: i.e. multiple games could take place at the same time on the same cave, due to the fact that the browser in each camera phone can accept cookies to disambiguate different players.