Being there is playing there: Checking in on the emergence of location-based games
It's a darn exciting time to be making games. New technologies are opening up entirely new avenues for game play and interaction. The Wii's magical Wiimote allows you to dance around your living room whacking virtual tennis balls. Facebook lets you play games with friends and strangers around the country—potentially all 300 million of them at the same time. Cellphones, the iPhone chief among them, put incredibly powerful computers and thus game systems right in your pocket.Your phone's with you everywhere you go, and the constant connectivity of cellphones makes them much more powerful than your average portable game system. These are devices that know where you are, who you know and that can connect you with other players. With GPS and constant data connections mobile phones enable new ways to play. The question is of course, "Are we ready to adopt these new technologies and all they might mean for how we play games?"