WhereCampPDX Locative Games Day

Sunday at WhereCampPDX was Locative Games. I played PacManhattan and did some geocaching.  I had heard of PacManhattan before, but playing is believing.  Essentially it is PacMan, but played in the real world with real people as both PacMan and the ghosts.  All of the ghosts wore rain ponchos to look more ghostlike.  Below is me playing Clyde.

Kate wearing a poncho playing Cylde the Ghost

Image Courtesy of Spinnerin's Flickr Stream

Apparently last year the game was played by calling back to homebase to update your position.  This year there was an web application that updated everyone’s location utilizes the javascript geolocation API in the phone.  The game works the same as regular PacMan, but PacMan picks up virtual pellets which disappear from his screen as he passes them.  There were some technical glitches with the iPhone updating location, but it was still a lot of fun.

The best part of the game was when we were walking to the starting corral.  Everyone was wearing a poncho despite the perfect weather and staring down at their phone.  We walked by a guy who tried to put his amusement into words, but just burst out laughing.

In the afternoon we did some geocaching.  Apparently standard geocaching latitude and longitude format is Degrees:Decimal Minutes, the iPhone applications most of us had didn’t support that format.  The two methods people used to make use of the points were either convert the locations to Decimal Degrees or download free iPhone apps until they found one that supported the format.  My geocaching partner Reid Beels and I opted to download iPhone apps until we found one that would work.  We settled on MotionX GPS Lite, which had an odd mix of features for a free app, I can only imagine what extra features the paid version has.  The free version had multiple map views and even iPod controls within it.  The one feature that was limited was that you could only save 3 waypoints.  Once we resolved the location format issues we were on our way and managed to come in second place.  For our efforts we won a compass, some travel bugs and a geocaching patch.  A travel bug is something trackable that moved from cache to cache.

Location games were a great followup to the hacking and sessions of the day before.  WhereCampPDX was one of the best unconferences I’ve ever attended.  It was well organized without being too controlled with a great a mix of people. Thanks everyone who organized as well as attended, it was an enjoyable time.

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October 5, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: unconferences

2 Responses

  1. AdamD - October 5, 2009

    Thanks for being the farthest traveled! The games sure have been fun, both years. I hope we Portlanders find a way to do it more than once a year. If you do any games in DC, blog about it. Maybe that will encourage us.

  2. Looking Back at WhereCampPDX | Reid Beels - October 13, 2009

    [...] of the hard work paid off and we had a great weekend of discussion and discovery. In her write up on the game day, the completely awesome Kate Chapman (who traveled the farthest to attend WhereCampPDX) wrote: [...]

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