The Change Mariner

Pac-Man Hits The Streets

The New York Times:

One recent sunny morning, in the student center overlooking Washington Square Park, four New York University graduate students wearing brightly colored sheets and sneakers and carrying cellphones gathered for a mission.

Somewhere out there on the streets of Greenwich Village, a fellow student was running around in a yellow Pac-Man suit. His four pursuers, code-named Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, aimed to track him down and snuff him out %u2014 the sooner, the better.

"Our strategy is a dragnet to block all the roads Pac-Man might go down," said Michael Olson, a k a Clyde the ghost. "You take that street," he said to Pinky, as he pointed to a map of the Village. "And I'll take this one."

So began a test run for a game of Pac-Manhattan, a real-world version of the 1980's video game played on the streets of New York and the latest example of a so-called "big game": a contest that uses wireless devices like cellphones and global positioning beacons to track players as they move through the urban grid, turning cities into vast game boards. Big games, with some players online and others pounding the pavement, have been staged in the last year in Minneapolis, Las Vegas and London.

Posted by Timothy Fredel at May 9, 2004 10:22 PM | TrackBack
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