STOCKHOLM -- There's a taxi driver in Stockholm known by the Web alias of Taxi31 who spends all his time between passengers shooting people. In Copenhagen, ferocious street battles flare daily between dozens of young men. The carnage occurs with cellular phones, not guns -- courtesy of new technologies that allow cell phone users to locate each other to within several hundred meters.
Two small companies -- It's Alive of Sweden and Wireless Factory of Denmark -- have carved out early positions in a new genre of location-based game-playing and entertainment that will likely expand soon from Europe to North America.
"We think location-based entertainment and commerce will be the raison d'etre of the mobile Internet," said Unwired Factory CEO Anders Kjærsgaard Sørensen.
Other companies creating games for the format include Sweden's Blue Factory and two Israeli companies: Valis and Iniru.
The games rely on a cell phone technology that allows mobile operators to pinpoint users' positions within "cells" formed by their phones' locations relative to nearby transmitters. In the United States, that capability is now required for all mobile operators to ensure that rescue workers can locate mobile users who are in trouble.
The technologies also allow the creation of location-based games that bring people close enough to raise their adrenaline levels, but not so close as to make them feel stalked.
"If someone could actually track you down and find you, that would be too scary," It's Alive CEO Sven Hålling said.
The company's signature game is BotFighters, which Hålling says has attracted between 7,000 and 8,000 players in Sweden and Finland. The game will launch shortly in Ireland.
In BotFighters, users role-play as robots that they pick from a community website. They can pick all kinds of extras like laser guns and missiles, using play money called "Robucks."
But once they start firing at each other in the real world, they pay real money -- about 20 cents for each move in the game. (The cell phones can "get" missions from the company's servers, "scan" for nearby enemies and, of course, "fire.")
Since intense battles often involve many moves, the games can quickly add up to some big phone bills.
Sweden's Taxi31, for instance, has chalked up bills as high as $4,000.
"He's crazy," Hålling said. "He has four phones in his taxi. He even brags on the website that he's driven 30 kilometers outside the city to get in battles."
People don't "die" in the games (operators don't like that); they only have their robot batteries depleted. They simply recharge and keep on fighting and spending more money (the operators like that). And, of course, It's Alive gets a cut.
Like many cell phone instant message services -- or SMS -- the cost of running BotFighters is relatively low. This is helping the tiny company to approach profitability despite the expense of programming and maintaining a graphically rich website.
It's Alive launched another location-based game called X-Fire last fall in conjunction with Britain's Channel 4. Based on a popular paintball TV competition, the game attracted as many as 11,000 people in the United Kingdom to sign up for the location-based version before it was temporarily shelved after Sept. 11.
Unwired Factory's ZoneMaster, a Risk-like game in which players amass collections of zombies to attack each other and control "zones" in Copenhagen and around Denmark, has inspired fanaticism similar to BotFighters. Sørensen says some players have been known to tool up and down the country on the railway looking for enemies to attack.
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