Would you play a game that required no actual input from you, but responded directly to things you did every day? Where your in-game progress was mapped to your real-world movements, or your success against enemies was matched to how often you made a phone call?
This is the strange world of Ambient Gaming, a movement tied to Zero-Player Gaming. Titles like Progress Quest or the newly released Ambient Quest incorporate no actual interaction between the user and the game at the time of play, but play themselves out purely based upon the natural, ambient lifestuff that players engage in when away from the computer.
Progress Quest is a game where the player's only interaction with the computer is to start the role playing game going. Ambient Quest is slightly more "interactive"; the number of steps a player takes per day controls the number of spaces she or her moves in the game.
Mark Eyles is the creator of Ambient Quest. He's also got a heck of a lot of game design experience, including a stint as Head of Design at Rebellion and consultant to EA, Sega, Microprose, Hasbro, Activision and SCI. Mark is currently Principal Lecturer in the Department of Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth and is doing a PhD with ambient gaming. He asks:
If the seminal 1976 ambient music album Music for Airports (Eno, 1978) became a 21st century ambient role playing game, what would it play like? What technologies would be required? What would we need to know for this to happen? Who would be the target audience?
I have a couple more questions to add: Is this an exercise in computational power or a new interface between human and machine? And importantly, how might this kind of game-like human-computer interaction change people's behaviours away from the screen?
I imagine blackbeltjones' (fictitious) Theri-ring, a technology which would create a new ringtone for my phone based upon my movements, would make me gesticulate more. And Mark's Ambient Quest pedometer has got me up and around more than my deskjob traditionally allows. What would happen if you combined this kind of interaction with an ARG like World Without Oil, where, for example, the number of miles you drive had a negative impact on the amount of information you had access to?
This is quite a wild idea, but I find it rather compelling. We'll be posting an interview with Mark soon, so go find your copy of Music for Airports and tune in.
