^ A panel from the wonderful, uplifting end sequence of The Filth

Paul from induce/deduce posts a playful idea today:

“In the midst of 2 recently announced games involving cultivating vegetables in Japan or your own garden in France, I want to try to put together the recent ideas I’ve had of a massively multiplayer GPS mobile phone green game.

Goal: A community of players working together to compensate the real pollution and eyesores of a city by planting and taking care of virtual flowers and other plants on a virtual data layer superimposed on the city.”

It’s a wonderful concept, and resonates with a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the last few months on social play, and the human fundamental drive to play.

Paul lists some aspirations for his idea:

• “ability to play on the move, for as little as a few minutes to as long as you want,
• makes you actively go out of your routine way to discover the city,
• dynamically links the real world with its virtual overlayed layer in space and time too (some object are only available in certain regions or during certain times of the day, phase of the moon or season.
• is not a battle.
• encourages community building.

Sounds fantastic, and I hope he gets it off the ground – heh.

It would be wonderful to look through one’s phone screen at the city and see it as Greg Feely does at the end of Morrison and Weston’s “The Filth”: teeming with digital flora tended by thousands of familiar strangers.