9 March 2008
UPDATED: SXSW Panel Recap: “You Are Here: Gaming and User’s Geolocation in Web 2.0″
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Events; Loki; Skyhook Wireless; Technology .
Yesterday we did the location-based gaming panel, You Are Here: Gaming and User’s Geolocation in Web 2.0, here at SXSW. On the panel was a great set of location-based game builders from very different facets of the movement.
Jeremy Irish — CEO/Founder of Groundspeak and Geocaching.com
Dennis Crowley — Dodgeball / Pacmanhattan / Plundr
Will Carter — MobZombies
Michael Sharon — Socialight
We started off talking about how the iPhone SDK announcement will change the casual gaming landscape. While some believed that it will make some casual games more accessible, the lack of ability to have a service running in the background adds some constraints around they type of persistent, casual games. Still everyone is looking forward to what it means for educating the market about location and hope to see it leveraged in more applications.
Also discussed were the different types of location-based games that were possible from urban games like Conquest, relative positioning games like MobZombies and games based on true geolocation like Geocaching and Plundr.
We ended with resources for people that want to get involved in either building their own games or playing:
WhereIGo - http://www.wherigo.com/
Loki - http://loki.com
area/code - http://areacodeinc.com
If you attended and have feedback — please leave a comment or post to photos from the session.
UPDATED: The audio of the session has been posted as a podcast on the SXSW site. You can find it here
