pervasive media studio

Txt Files

The tXt Files ran over a weekend in September '08 during igfest, the Interesting Games Festival, organised by studio residents Simon Games, players could choose to play it at any point over the two days of the festival. The game took place not only over a relatively long span of time, but also over an extended space: approximately 1 square kilometre of central Bristol, none of which was reserved for the event. The tXt Files places the player in the role of a spy for aliens requiring more intelligence before they invade. The content was structured into sets of questions or „missions‟ that were located in different physical locations throughout the city requiring players to be in a specific location in order to find answers to the questions. In addition, two staff posed as „aliens‟ each day enabling impromptu in-the-moment interactions resulting in special missions should the players encounter them while moving around the game space.

To minimise intrusion and encourage natural play, the game ran on the users Java-enabled mobile phones and, to maximise our potential user-base, SMS messages were used instead of data plans (which are costly and have low penetration in the UK) to communicate with the game server.

To explore the use of prompts to draw players back into the game over long periods of time, we periodically unlocked new groups of missions over the course of the two days. These unlock codes were sent as plaintext SMS messages to the user‟s normal message inbox.

Highly compressed state information was sent by the player using SMS to the game server along with their high score and they received their position within the high score table in response. To augment this summary data, Bluetooth was used to transfer a much larger dataset containing detailed logging information whenever the player encountered an alien or visited our booth at the event.

Alien encounters began when the player noticed a visual cue that an alien was present. The player then started a Bluetooth scan for the special device being carried by the alien and began a verbal interaction with the alien in order to answer the unlocked mission questions. The data transfer occurred in parallel to this activity.