Slashgeo

Can you believe you're going to see GPS The Movie at a theater near you? Plot summary (part): A group of adventure-seeking college friends embark on a GPS scavenger hunt in the Northwest wilderness. When they come to the treasure location they find what appears to be a small grave. They dig up the grave and find a small coffin that contains something shocking and confusing. Inside the coffin are photographs of a woman tied up and masked, and a new set of GPS coordinates deeper in the forest. Here's the IMDB entry.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about location based games. From the article: "Thanks to portable GPS units, mobile phones, public wi-fi hotspots and the internet, gamers worldwide are now roaming cities in the guise of their gaming personas, which can range from spies and assassins to poker players, detectives, ghosts and even characters from the wild west."

Very Spatial have a nice summary of Sony's Global Mapping System and the upcoming PS3 game console. They also link to a NaviGadget entry with PSP GPS screenshots. From VS's entry: "And, by integrating its mapping functionality with its very popular gaming and other entertainment features (imagine playing DDR using real-world data, for example), Sony’s networked platforms will allow even more users to seamlessly integrate geospatial information into their dail experiences in ways that we probably can’t imagine."

The GeoCarta blog discuss The Shroud, a new location-based game. From this article: "The Shroud may be the first high-profile location-aware game to come to market in the United States. The offering will get the benefit of marketing muscle from Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is acting as co-publisher, and Sprogis claims the title will get deck space—a key for any wireless game. What’s more, The Shroud is a tiered offering: consumers with less-sophisticated phones or only a casual interest can pick up the game and ward off monsters alone, while gamers looking for a more immersive experience can experiment with the multiplayer and location-aware features." From the FAQ: "Q. What do I need to play The Shroud? A. All you need is a cell phone. Check out supported device list on this site." If you have a GPS, it opens the door to much more game features. See below for additional geospatial games.

Both Vector One and Spatial Sustain discuss this week what is the influence of gaming on geotechnology. From V1: "In fact, it can be argued that as GIS and geotechnology contribute real-world spatial data into the modeling and gaming environment – games becoming more reality based. [...] Gaming is shifting science to entertainment – make no mistake, some serious science is embedded into gaming development, tools and products. The shift that is taking place is more subtle, causing science to be fun and the pursuit of knowledge and discovery (key ingredients of science) to be entertaining." From SS: "Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology is being married to their Flight Simulator software program to provide greater realism at multiple scales so that those piloting simulated aircraft have a more realistic experience from the cockpit. [...] We are in need of greater realism, and the expanded demand of the gaming community means that there is a revenue stream to pay for the collection of more detailed and realistic models. The geospatial community is in need of more interdisciplinary interaction, and the creation of more collaborative gaming platforms could help pave the way for more interactive simulation environments that could be harnessed to understand earth systems." I copied below a few geospatial games mentioned previously, yes, there's *a lot of them* (and much more that probably weren't shared on Slashgeo).

Some not-so-closely related geoblog entries. First is Spatial Sustain linking to an article showing correlation between the spatial distribution of fast food restaurants and obesity in Canada. Very Spatial discuss MapEcos a site mapping U.S. industrial pollution. And finally if you have some time during the holidays, APB links to an article about the Traveler IQ Challenge online game, I admit I tried the game some time ago and its simplicity and educative components charmed me. From the MapEcos article: "It offers information on the environmental performance of more 20,000 industrial facilities across the country. Visitors use an interactive map to reveal government data on toxic pollution as well as information from the facilities themselves on what they are going to protect the environment, being gathered by the site's developers." Several related stories below.

Chris Spagnuolo's GeoScrum blog has a very nice game for the GIS professional on it. It written completely in flash and is very fun to play. It involves being given a random location on the earth, and few seconds to click that location on the map. Give it a go and post your scores here so the rest of the GeoCommunity can make fun of your low scores :). Update: 04/10 13:59 GMT by S : This game was mentioned before on Slashgeo previously. I also copied some other previous geo-games below. And since many shared their score, here's mine: 527,701 pts, Level: 12, Trav. IQ: 127 (I admit this score was not done on my first try, but I haven't played often ;-). Update #2: Thanks to Marc K. for the submission of the same story prior the publishing of this one (yours has been pending too long in our system - thanks for your efforts).