Inaugural Independent Games Festival

In August, The Independent Games Festival announced the first-ever IGF Mobile competition. They expanded the Festival to promote innovation in handheld games, from cellphone games through other mobile devices, built in Windows Mobile to Palm and beyond, all the way to PSP and DS titles. They recieved over 50 entries, and have announced the winners. It seems that most of the community-oriented locative media projects are games. Not being a gamer, I feel a little left out. But that leaves me with only one dictum: if you don’t like what’s being produced, go produce your own stuff.

Two locative games were finalists. They include Anna’s Secret, a GPS driven, location-based learning adventure game based in the city of Weimar, Germany, and PhoneTag Elite, a location-tracking mobile game of “hide-and-seek.”

Anna’s Secret
Anna’s Secret is a GPS driven, location-based learning adventure game for cultural content in the city of Weimar (Germany). A player walks with a GPS-able Pocket PC through a park and sees sights. Video clips show Anna and explain the sights, which have an important role in the game. Along the way players have to solve different quests and mysteries to solve Anna’s Secret. If they do well, they can find a treasure chest. The story of a ghost that suffers from amnesia is used to immerse the player into the gameplay. Many videos show the ghost Anna or details of the park and its history. Anna’s Secret is based on a “geocaching“ gameplay, but extends this play by video and film clips, multimedia features, components of a adventure game and a real, historical background story. The game was developed by Jan Ulrich Schmidt. The project is a diploma thesis at the Bauhaus-University of Weimar at the professorship for media and interface design.

Take a look at a video describing the game.

This report via www.gpsbusinessnews.com

Posted: January 06, 2008