Through the live walkie-talkie stream the online players could hear when the runners were tired, cold and struggling, giving an insight into how hard their adversaries were having to work to hunt them down on the streets. The forum was public, shared with everyone in the game, but also allowed for players and runners to address each other directly, personally. Often, this dialogue was based on insults, teasing, goading and humour. Players’ messages appeared on runners’ devices runners’ walkie-talkie chatter was streamed unfiltered into the online game. Players could use text chat, and runners an open voice channel, to interact with one another in the game. This format took a simple playground game and introduced a twist – of players stretched across physical and virtual space. If a runner got too close, players were ‘seen’ and knocked out of the game. Using the arrow keys, players explored the virtual city, all the while trying to avoid the runners. ![]() The last words they heard were the runner announcing their catch, referring to them by the name of the person they haven’t seen for a long time. This person – absent in place and time – seems irrelevant to the subsequent gameplay only at the point that the player was caught or ‘seen’ by a runner did they hear the name mentioned again as part of the live audio feed from the streets. From that moment issues of presence and absence run through the game. By sharing the same ‘space’, the players online and runners on the street entered into a relationship that was adversarial, playful and, ultimately, filled with pathos.Īs soon as a player registered they had to answer the question: ‘Is there someone you haven’t seen for a long time that you still think of?’. The physical city was overlaid with a virtual city to explore ideas of absence and presence. It was developed during a long period of research and development in London and Nottingham exploring Global Positioning Systems and wireless networking.Ĭan You See Me Now? took the fabric of the city and made our location within it central to the gameplay. This project was the second major collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham after Desert Rain. An audio stream from the runners' walkie talkies allowed players to eavesdrop on their pursuers: getting lost, cold and out of breath on the streets of the city. With up to 100 people playing online at a time, players used text chat to exchange tactics and send messages to the runners. Runners chased after online players, using mobile devices to follow their location live, whilst runners' positions were tracked by satellite and updated in real time on the 3D game area. Online players navigated a 3D map of a city-centre game area, whilst Blast Theory runners were on the streets for real. Along with Botfighters, Can You See Me Now? was one of the first location based games.
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