Pac-Manhattan: playing in the real world

New York University students staged a real, live Pac-Man game in the streets of New York. It’s an experiment to explore how computer games perform when played into real-world environments.

Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980’s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their “little world” of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger “real world” of street corners, and cities.

A player dressed as Pac-man will run around the Washington square park area of Manhattan while attempting to collect all of the virtual “dots” that run the length of the streets. Four players dressed as the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde will attempt to catch Pac-man before all of the dots are collected.

Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.

Source: Pac-Manhattan

So began a test run for a game of Pac-Manhattan, a real-world version of the 1980’s video game played on the streets of New York and the latest example of a so-called “big game”: a contest that uses wireless devices like cellphones and global positioning beacons to track players as they move through the urban grid, turning cities into vast game boards. Big games, with some players online and others pounding the pavement, have been staged in the last year in Minneapolis, Las Vegas and London.

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Steve Benford, a professor at the Mixed Reality Laboratory of the University of Nottingham in England, who has worked on Savannah and Uncle Roy, said the games thrilled players because unlike regular computer video games, they incorporated physical activity and social interaction, not unlike some reality television programs. The games, he said, also encourage people to push the bounds of accepted behavior.

Source:
Quick, After Him: Pac-Man Went Thataway
(*Good article and high quality photos*)