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Geoinformatics_03-2009
article figure 4: some intersections points are really difficult to find, like the point n48° 14 e16° 24 . covery a challenge or a robber and cop game, merging real and virtual spaces. eventually location awareness seems to be a key element of many urban games and i expect it to become the most important element of many urban games in the near future. location awareness that is, using devices that know and display the position of all players and objects to a certain degree, enables the players to react on other players movements. in most urban games location awareness will be only given partially and depending on the role a player has. the actual challenge of most urban games will then be to guess where others are going and what other players are doing while they only have a partial knowledge about their location and movement. furthermore it is still an open question how the location awareness of the device has an effect on the spatial perception of the players. many urban games have an educational purpose as they want to communicate the history of a city or the establish knowledge for the orientation within a city or educate about a certain local topic. some research points out that the effect of using location aware devices is not necessarily a broadened location awareness of the player. in contrary, in some cases the players in urban games totally forget about the specific meaning of the materiality of urban space and do hardly realize anything else than the virtual setting. while partial location awareness for different roles of players allows the creation of interesting challenges in space, the game itself has full location awareness. in fact all location information can be stored continuously which opens new possibilities for the review and scoring of games. poral analysis of the player s movements with the tracking analyst extension. arcexplorer is another tool to be used for visualising the game flow and additionally adding photos to certain point features. during the egea western regional congress a urban game has been played using the product portfolio of esri. the competing teams had to find ten places given on ten pictures and then make a photo and set a place-mark with their pda. every group had a gps-enabled pda with arcpad installed. it has been used to create the place-marks and to log their track through the city. afterwards the game has been analysed in arcmap and arcexplorer. this is still an easy way to use available gissoftware for urban gaming. the adoption of arcgis server and mobile communication seems to be a very powerful instrument for the creation of urban games that also can take realtime location awareness into account. location signals of various players can be sent by mobile connection to the arcgis server that does the real-time server-side processing and forwards necessary location information about the state of play on the mobile maps of all players. it seems that esri already provides all components to set-up and urban game, do they. maybe this can be a future business case for esri? arcgis server might be too powerful to only use it for gaming as some of you might think. of course more than simple urban games could be done with arcgis server but nevertheless: why shall we not think about it. a message. in fact many urban games that we know nowadays have their roots in an artistic initiative. it is still a question which effects games have on spatial perception and spatial experience. at least they seem to be a perfect opportunity to try out action and evaluate individual knowledge and thus prepare for real life. probably that is why they used for team-building often. finally if you once played an urban game you immediately get addicted to this mixture of playing, using geospatial technology and being outside. addicted like all the participants of the workshop on urban games were in the end of the egea western regional congress. contact: florian fischer ffischer@geoinformatics.com, gis editor geoinformatics and research assistant at the austrian academy of sciences giscience research facility in salzburg, austria. the author would like to thank the following workshop participants for their contributions: matyas rajnai (hungary), elisabeth gruber (austria), martinus everhardus spoelstra (the netherlands), stefanie rieger (germany), andrei molnar (romania), christine ornetsmuller (austria), vlad dumitrescu (romania), sylvain rigollet (france), dick de munter (the netherlands); thank you to my co-workshop leader elisabeth wimmer from the ludwig-maximiliansuniversitat munchen; and last but not least thank you to daniel schober from esri germany for providing the hardware and software for the workshop and for dedicating so much of his time to the preparation and the performance during the workshop. links: gis and games much more than scavenger hunt gis for gaming analysis gis software provides a huge tool box not only to conduct urban games but to analyse them as well. i will take the product portfolio of esri for example. arcpad as a mobile client runs on most pdas with a windows mobile operating system. thus arcpad could act as the client for the game to show an actual map with interesting objects for the player, record a gps-track and even allow for input within the game. the desktop gis arcmap can then be used to analyse and visualize the game afterwards. this could be average speed, longest way or highest total difference in altitude or a spatio-temlatest news? visit www.geoinformatics.com frisse wind events the waddengame: concluding urban games are empowered by www.frissewind.com geospatial technology and often enabled only la mosca citygames the target: by it. i expect urban games to develop in the www.lamosca.be/thetarget_en.htm direction of locative media games in the near 4816 - confluence project vienna: http://4816.nsew.at future. mapping, mobile communication and egea western regional congress 2009: location services will be key technologies for www.egea.eu/congresses/wrc09 urban games then. the technology already exists but it has to be simplified because gaming is not about figure 5: visualizing results reading a 500 page manual. so of an urban game via far most urban games have their arcexplorer roots in three archetypes. games in the robber and the cop category are mostly about fast action like running, about chasing each and to foresee the next steps of your competitors. games like geo-caching are usually a scavenger hunt for places or objects. their aim is to cope with a row of tasks in order to find a location or be guided along interesting tour. still there are also many artistic urban games that do not follow a certain aim but want to transport 13 april/may 2009
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