Your city is a game

During the first Alpha test round that I played in Helsinki sometime late July 2010 I first experienced how a location aware game that is build on entire city neighborhoods results in very different experience than a game build on specific venues. Not only that, but also how bringing something magical extra on top of the familiar city can result in much more than I would ever think my city could be.

It was around 8pm in the evening when I got a text message from Tina: “If you want to save our cause, greens are assaulting the center! We need a trap there, stat!”. I immediately logged in to Shadow Cities to see if I could jump to the center through a Beacon. It seemed like this was not an option. There was no Beacons close enough the center that I could come in rescue and stop whatever the orange team was planning. What made the issue more urgent was that since it was the last day of the game and whoever had more Energy harvested at the end of the day won the whole Round.

I closed the application and sat there for a few seconds and then grabbed my bike and texted Tina back while rushing out with my bike:“Where should i resurface and attack? Am on my bike. You are my eyes. Guide and we’ll surprise attack”. Tina told me the most intense battle was fought at the east end of Esplanadi. I rode there and stopped my bike in front of restaurant Vespa on Eteläesplanadi. Just before I logged-in to surface right in the middle of the battle. I called Mikko to agree on a quick strategy. Mikko was coding at his home in Töölö and didn’t know that the Orange team had attacked the center. We agreed that I should above all else plant a Beacon there so he and others could jump to the center as I would surely get slaughtered quickly after I surface and ran out of Mana. This way we would have a channel to the center. This is exactly what happened, but Ursus had planted so many traps that I didn’t get the chance to plant our Beacon on the first try before I was out of Mana again. It started to rain slowly and I knew I could not leave the Esplanadia area before I had secured a Beacon for our team there, so I figured I might as well go to Vespa and get a beer while waiting for my Mana to build up. There I sat sipping my beer and eagerly staring at my phone in the corner table. After some intense 20 minutes I finally got the Beacon planted and quite successfully also fought back pushing the Greens back with the help of Mikko and Tina. I believe this was a crucial battle that defined the outcome of the round. We won and I could have not been happier. The next day I retold the story several times, laughed, went to possible different scenarios and couldn’t help but wonder where Ursus, the orange team player that hold Esplanadi, had been hiding. Our guess was that he must have been dining in one of the restaurants in the area.

It’s safe to say that this experience was very different from what I would have had with any of the current games out there. By focusing on an area instead of a specific venue the city as a whole came to life when you could strategize and plan your play based on where you lived, how fast you could make your way to other neighborhoods, where your allies lived, worked or commuted around on a normal day. Further, even the normally really boring routes and neighborhoods became interesting when they radiated something new and interesting. The normal daily behavior and commute was a great platform for game play. Soon the game play started to take cues from the locations and the emerging relationships around these locations by mixing the real and unreal. This was city I hadn’t know before, but it clearly rocked!