February 13, 2003
Pervasive gaming
Pervasive gaming is the vision of Swedish company It's Alive!, meaning location-based games that surround you, 24 hours a day, everywhere. When you walk down the street, you're walking through an adventure world draped on top of the real world, and people you meet may be characters in the same game you're playing.
In their much written about game, BotFighters, which has formed a fanatical following in Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Russia, the players locate and shoot at each other with their cell phones out on the streets, where mobile positioning is used to determine whether the users are close enough to each other to be able to hit.
On the BotFighters website, a robot theme community, the players may upgrade their robots, buy weapons, chat, view high scores and get the real time position of other players.
During a game play, the player sends an SMS (or uses his WAP phone) to check his targets real time physical location. If the target is within range, the player can shoot by sending a "fire" SMS.
Some good articles on BotFighters in both Wired and The Guardian,
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