The world according to Andrew

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about games for commuters. More specifically how there doesn’t really seem to be any that require any kind of interaction with those around you. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Many people in close proximity, in my case for 45 minutes at a time with little to do and a mobile phone in their hand.

A bit of observational research over the last week has shown me that most people have a mobile of some kind, Blackberry, iPhone or Android and most use them for either playing a game of some kind (95% Angry Birds), sending SMS messages, reading email or looking at Twitter. All of these devices are capable of bluetooth, have GPS and, where it’s available, are internet connected (3G in the UK is rubbish at the best of times but on a moving train skipping between cell’s you might as well just not bother). In fact the number of people glued to their mobile devices for their entire journey is staggering.

A year or so ago I drew up a prototype for a Bluetooth transmitter that could be attached to trains magnetically and that could then be used by brands to broadcast to mobile devices used by commuters, an ideal tool for advertising or streaming in movie trailers etc (these days it could be a wi-fi hotspot rather than Bluetooth). Unfortunatly it also looked like a bomb and with all the bad things going on in the world I didn’t fancy causing a full scale terror alert by carrying out a field test. I still think the idea is sound, although the idea has evolved into one where the phones act as a grid to manage the game where certain devices act as super nodes brokering game data etc in a similar way to which Skype works. It’s on my projects list to prototype in the coming months.

I’ve also started to think a little about what a game mechanic in this area might look like. Imagine if tribes of commuters could play against each other, say the 7.30 from Milton Keynes plays the 5.50 from Manchester, economies could be set up, goods farmed and bartered, battles fought (perhaps for who sits and who stands) I think the scope for this is pretty wide and the opportunities for gamifying the commute many..

The problem I can see though is that commuters don’t really seem to interact with each other, commuting despite the proximity to others seems to be a very solitary activity. I’ve travelled with many of the same people every day, twice a day for the last ten years. I don’t know any of there names and we don’t really even acknowledge we’ve seen each other before. Perhaps this is an opportunity to use technology to change that. In fact on the list is a future blog post about using technology to enable people to interact with strangers as it’s something i’ve been thinking about for a while – why do I never say hello to the woman I see in the coffee shop queue every single morning, why does the man on the platform never say good morning? I know I want to but feel I can’t.

Anyway for now commuters seem happy with the latest iteration of Angry Birds so I guess I have some time :)