If you can’t ride two horses at once, you ought not be in the circus. – James Maxton, former Labour Party MP
Mike Delosreyes over at Big Spaceship poses a great question this week on gaming:
Why don’t more games require us to multitask?
I imagine the gamers who like taking care of their Sims’ needs in The Sims would be good at, say, an air traffic control game or any kind of traffic control system. I believe there is an ATC game for the DS and ground-level traffic games in Japan. I think the closest games we have now of similar complexity are flight simulators.
As Mike correctly points out (and you should really read his whole post), many of us spend our entire days multitasking. The very fact that so many people are talking this week about the New York Times visualization of Twitter activity during the Super Bowl1 underscores the fact that many among us think nothing of texting and twittering along as we watch television. The idea that console gaming has not wholly run with this state of affairs is, frankly, surprising.
It’s not a meme yet (or perhaps it already was), but there’s a striking similarity in a post from Russell Davies this week in which he explores his newfound amusement with an iPhone application called WideNoise. The application allows users to track ambient noise and, using the built-in GPS in the phone, help generate a global map of decibel levels.
It’s not really a game at all, it’s a tool for measuring sound levels and sharing them on a map. But it’s got just the right levels of interaction to make it playful while walking along. You poke at it occasionally, it makes some satisfying buzzing and you feel like you’re engaged in something. It turns the walk into a project.
This is another form of multitasking altogether – the integration of a active experience (the application) into a passive experience (the walk) that informs a collaborative experience (the map).
The immersive games that were in such vogue early in the decade suggest a great model for a new model of casual immersive gaming that leverage the portability of our mobile devices, the ubiquitous opportunities for the deployment of 2-dimensional bar codes, the rich world of console gaming and the ability to deliver real-time status to a global set of competitors (or collaborators).
- take your pick: Neil Perkin or Iain Tait [↩]
Related posts:
- Great Street Games as a Platform for Urban Exploration
- Project Natal vs. Tactile Response
- Neoteny and Playfulness and Pretend
- Data Talks, Data Walks
- Reinvention is Coming