This was developed while I was a Professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division, as part of a project for the Mobile and Environmental Media class I taught in Spring 2007.
The game was developed by grad students (at the time) Will Carter and Aaron Meyers.
I contributed some of the sensor hardware (like the crazy contrivances you see in the photos below) which, at the time, was very bespoke and included commercial 3-axis accelerometers and compass units which were interfaced through an Arduino board and shoved into the rendering device (sometimes a Sony portable PC running Windows, and eventually a Nokia N95) over either a serial or bluetooth connection. The game itself was a Processing application that ran tha ctual rendering and game logic.
The objective of the game is simple: stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you stay alive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you. The mobile aspect of the game - the player must navigate the physical world to control their avatar - makes the premise of MobZombies much more complex and difficult. Just because there are no obstacles in the virtual world of the game doesn't mean that there aren't obstacles in the real world. Imagine running away from a zombie and realizing that the only way you can continue to evade it is by somehow negotiating a brick wall in the physical space or running through the football practice field during a scrimmage.
MobZombies is inspired by like-minded mobile games such as Botfighers or Mogi, where the player's movement in the physical world correlates to the game space. The most interesting aspect of these kind of mobile games is that they begin blurring the line between the fiction of the game world and the normal, real environment that we deal with every day. Because we carry mobile devices with us everywhere, it becomes fun to think about a version of MobZombies that kicks in at random times during the day, forcing you to stop whatever you were doing and try as hard as you can to avoid the undead.
MobZombies, therefore is a mobile game designed not only to leverage mobility and incorporate physical movement into a gameplay experience, but also a broader move towards the increased spontaneity that mobile devices afford.
ARGAUGMENTED REALITYGAMEMOBILE GAMINGPOKEMON
The Outcomes
A beautiful exploration at the edges or location-based, in-world, augmented reality gaming at a time where the concepts could be hard to realize as it required lots of cobbling together of various bits of kit — hardware, software, etc. A great example of a project that was ahead of its time.
This is MobZombies — a project from 2007 when I was a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in the Interactive Media Division. Back in those days, pre iPhone, there was lots of exploration and experimentation in the realm of “location-based gaming”, or more generally location-based experiences (or services as the more commercial opportunists referred to it.)
MobZombies was an early exploration of physical electronic play, blending new electronic contrivances with the ludic character of the traditional play-ground — which in my recollection was not much more than an expansive field perhaps with a few bits of things to clamber on/over/into precariously by today’s safety standards and parenting practices.
This was all pre-iPhone and such and certainly well before we had sensor-packed contrivances of unimaginable computational power (from the perspective of 2007) humming in our hands. We saw into the evolution of gaming and had the fortitude and skills and vision to build it by hook or crook. And it was hook or crook.
MobZombies, a project blending playground-style physical play with digital gaming, is now featured on Processing.org. This is like a step toward games that mix real-world activity with screen-based fun. Inspired in part by people like David Elkind on childhood development and reports on physical fitness, we were wondering about the need for games that encourage both social and physical activity.
I’m sharing this here as I gather old posts an projects from the old Near Future Laboratory blog (which I started in 2005) and move them over to this new site.
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