Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
"The Hidden Playground"

Four or five months ago now a game called “The Hidden Park” came out as an app for the iPhone platform, and it offered a rather unique experience. By using the device’s built-in GPS and camera, players could visit real world places and “augment” those places with virtual creatures that they could interact with digitally.

This trend of “Augmented reality” really provides an interesting shift in how people are now seeing “gaming.” For most parents and concerned adults before, gaming was a “playing actively outdoors” versus “sitting in front of the screen indoors” thing; but now, we’re seeing that the two don’t have to be so diametrically opposite.

The ever-excellent doctoral candidate and blogger Sara Grimes has an essay about this new form of play over at The Escapist Magazine:

Drawing on trends established in alternate reality games, this new crop of outdoor gaming titles incorporate real-world exploration into gameplay through the use of GPS and wireless communication. Buildings, park benches and cul-de-sacs become the secret hiding places of fantastical creatures and treasures. As such, they provide kids with shared tools for re-defining their relationships with urban and suburban landscapes.

Imagine this emerging genre as the digital equivalent of a “seeing stone.” The seeing stone shows up in a number of modern fairytales, including Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s The Spiderwick Chronicles and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. A primitively carved totem, its key feature is the eye-sized hole in its center. By looking through this hole, the children in these stories are able to see aspects of the world that are usually invisible to humans: magic, fairies, portals to other dimensions, ghosts and goblins and even other people’s souls. The idea that the world around us is much more magical than it seems has clear links with childhood traditions of outdoor play and make-believe….

hat is promising about these seeing stone games is the way in which they open up space for those more imaginative and autonomous forms of play. By breaking down existing definitions of what an urban or suburban landscape is, how it should be experienced and what kids are expected to do there, games like The Hidden Park put forth a direct challenge to the idea that public space is inappropriate and dangerous for kids. Once this space is opened up, so is the play potential. That’s really all that outdoor play and the wilderness of childhood have ever needed to thrive.

It does just boggle the mind with possibilities, doesn’t it? Makes me excited to see what childhood will be like ten, fifteen years from now.

Nov 23, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #