Real-life internet games: the next big thing or a waste of time?

If some cultural and technology commentators are to be believed, social networks are the next (or the current) big thing. Before long we are all going to be conversing through these networks and conducting more of our lives online.

While that may be unlikely – despite the hype, many social networks are limited to a group of tech-savvy early adopters – there are other interesting things going on.

One of those is the advent of social ‘games’ in which users are given tasks, challenges and points to perform when they do everyday things.

In the beginning
The best-known such game is Foursquare, which describes itself as “a location-based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore”.

Translated into English, what that means is that users can ‘check in’ using a mobile phone or other device whenever they go to a new place.

Checking into a new location shares that user’s location with their friends and saves a record of them being in a particular place.

The ‘game’ part of all this comes because once users who check into the same place more often than anyone else (averaged over the previous 60 days) they will be declared ‘mayor’ of that place until someone else makes more check-ins, ousting the existing mayor.

Similarly, users can earn ‘badges’ when they check into certain places. Companies have been known to give prizes and free items and services to mayors.

Having started small in 2009, the company recently announced that it has signed up seven million users across the world.

Its rival company, Gowalla, offers a similar service with virtual items that can be swapped and dropped in other places for others to find. Dropping an item somewhere makes the user a ‘founder’ of that place and items can be linked to actual prizes. The big daddy of all social networks, Facebook, announced a similar service of its own called Facebook Places.

It’s not the first time people have tried to link computerised pursuits to real-world entertainment: in so-called alternate reality games, which have been around for some years, players find clues and solve puzzles in the real world and online.

Such games are often created to market a film or computer game - examples have included the film AI, television shows Heroes and Spooks and the games Halo and Portal.

In 2004 we wrote about the niche pursuit of geocaching, which involves people burying trinkets in the real world and using a GPS receiver, like those used in satellite-navigation devices, to post the co-ordinates online, allowing others to hunt them down.