Paul Baron used to love riding his bicycle around the back streets of Tokyo with his GPS camera phone, hunting down pictures of what he calls the real Japan. But now he's spending a lot of his time navigating the city and hunting down something a little more ephemeral.
Not long ago, a friend turned Baron on to a mobile-phone-based game called Mogi, Item Hunt. It sends players out and about in Tokyo searching for virtual treasure by using the GPS technology built into their phones.
Items like flowers, fruits or creatures are "hidden" around Tokyo, and are visible on a city map on players' mobile phones. Players form teams, comb the city and try to find each item in various "collections." They also try to find players from other teams working on different collections with whom to trade.
Baron dove right in.
"At that time, there were already more than 10 collections, so it was fun," he says. "Wherever I would go, I would check the game, and there was always an item (nearby) I didn't have (that I could) go and get," which drove his girlfriend nuts.
Mogi is but one of the latest examples of a developing trend: location-based mobile gaming. But according to some people familiar with mobile gaming, Mogi may well be the most important.
"I think it's a next-generation mobile game," says Amy Jo Kim, who studies social architectures. "Some of why it's important is that it's based on collecting and trading-game mechanics rather than fighting-game mechanics. So that's gender-neutral, which is really appropriate for the mobile audience."
Mogi uses GPS to determine where players are in relation to the items they're seeking. When a player gets within 400 meters of an item, they've found it, as it were, and the item's icon on the map changes color, so everyone knows it has been collected.
Justin Hall, a writer who covers, among other things, mobile technologies, thinks Mogi's importance lies in the way it fosters teamwork and communication between players sitting in front of their PCs and those moving around with mobile phones. Effectively, he points out, players at PCs figure out where the players are in the city and direct them to the closest treasure.
"What's astonishing about Mogi is that it provides a system for people to coordinate and team up and inhabit cities in ways they never have before," Hall suggests. "It's dispatching. It's recreational dispatching, like a cab company, or police or the fire department. It's fabulously fascinating, this idea that, hey, I'm sitting on my computer at home looking at the Mogi map, and that thing our group wants is over on the west side of town. You're the closest, so (you go get it) because it's important for the group."
To Mathieu Castelli, the creator of Mogi, the fact that it makes cooperative teams out of the sedentary and the mobile is indeed key to its importance in creating community, even when certain members are far-flung.
"Some of our players live outside Tokyo, in distant neighborhoods, and they always want to do like what the people in Tokyo do," he says. "So when you give them a chance to feel what daily life is in Tokyo through the movements of teammates moving on the Tokyo map, they enjoy themselves."
As Kim points out, Mogi is rare among its peers for its non-fighting nature.
Baron, who writes about the growing location-based mobile-gaming market, believes battle-based games such as Gunslingers, Undercover and Botfighers have a definite appeal, but might not be able to form community the way Mogi does.
"They are about conquest and battles, and that's probably great fun, but how do you build a community when you have to kill the community?" he wonders. "It's very James-Bondy to eliminate or conquer land with a small device, no?"
For now, location-based mobile gaming is a niche market, often depending on players owning specific phones and subscribing to specific carriers. For example, Mogi – which is currently only available in Japan – requires GPS phones from Japanese carrier KDDI.
Further, such games are largely appearing in Asia and Europe. The United States hasn't caught up with the technology or the culture required to drive the games.
"I think it's going to take a lot longer for location-based gaming to penetrate the U.S. market," said Kim. "I think the really exciting stuff is going to take off outside the U.S. for the next couple years.... The way we use mobile phones in the U.S. is different, because we don't have (much) public transportation. We're more of a car-based culture."
Castelli also believes it could take some time before games like Mogi hit the United States.
The sheer size of the United States means it's not a natural playground for a game like Mogi, which relies on dense urban areas and short distances between population centers to entice players to track down the virtual loot, or other players.
"'Closest player 1,340 kilometers,' is not so exciting," Castelli says of a likely American Mogi scenario.
Still, Castelli also says success at Mogi doesn't preclude driving. Rather, he says, cars can be useful to players.
"Our best players in Tokyo are people who play by car," he says. "They play at the red light, at the stop (sign and) at all those breaks that you have to endure."
In fact, he says the two best players have been a delivery man, who would collect Mogi items on his way to and from dropping off tatami mats, and a 32-year-old truck driver.
Location-based mobile gaming is just getting started. The Mogis and Undercovers of the world have set the stage, but in order to lure mass audiences, game developers will have to keep innovating.
Baron is optimistic. He foresees such gaming encompassing "cross-continent missions, team missions, missions or quests spanning days (and) encouraging different cultures to collaborate."
Indeed, Baron says he hopes such future gaming will emphasize collaboration rather than fighting.
In any case, Baron notes that as mobile technology advances, so will the games.
"I think the very nature of phones – mobility – will somehow influence the genre of games and the DNA of the games that'll come out," he says, "and make them a new breed."
