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contactWhat is the CitizenMOB?
The game is a massive multiplayer online, location based game, played upon a mobile phone technology. The key concept is to provide the player with sophisticated mixed reality experiences, using location tracking technology, story narration and virtual characters, which are the interface between virtual and real world.
Philosophy
Merging the real with the virtual world
The best stories that have been written are those which offer the reader fantastic worlds, over-the-top characters and impossible situations – only to finally bring up and discuss problems we are just too familiar with. It took a relenting whale and a crazy captain to draw a picture of total obsessive ambition, a galaxy far, far away and a little green fighting sport master, who had the power, to show the complex nature of father and son relationships. A little gild chasing a white rabbit while meeting card game monarchs has been the most popular book about the effects of drug use for over 100 years and people still read through the adventures of a Greek warrior who got lost on sea and tries to return home in order to reflect about determined love and passion. It seems, that it is this little extra of exaggeration and drama that opens our senses and minds and enables us to re-explore the worlds, which are so close to us - worlds, which have been left unrecognized due to their obvious, every-day existence, ironically.
It is the aim of the game to follow this awareness. By merging real and virtual worlds, those well known spaces and locations are going to be re-experienced and re-filled with conscious, not by re-inventing them but by adding meaning and, most importantly, some spice. We hope, that new experiences can be made by actively exploring known locations and that new areas will be discovered, aside well-known paths. Virtual additions to reality will be used to finally enable us take in a position of seeing our every-day world from a new angle. The place we live in is, after all, most adventurous - both in virtual and real world!
Mobility as experience
The ubiquitousness of mobile systems is more than a coincidence, a fashion. Its success demonstrates too well the current way to live a life. Mobility has become more than a temporal state of being, it has become a lifestyle, an undeniably requirement at the individual and even a political statement. People are supposed to be on the move, to get from home to work and back, to get to their holiday and weekend recreation destinations, to be socially, even to get daily life managed. And as we spend more and more time on the way, we become less aware that we are actually traveling. We do work on the plane and on the train, recreate and relax ourselves by driving the car and listening to loud music and ride the bike in order to replace the work-out sessions. Mobility, now, means to do something in between while changing locations.
The aim of the game is to integrate the everyday mobility into the game and, thus, to bring the mobility back to the awareness of the people. Playing while moving; and moving in order to play, is one of the most important paradigms of the game...
Enabling new ways of interaction
The game is going to enable interaction and new ways of communication. As we are citizens in a, more or less, but nevertheless so-called, civilized world, most of our interactions with other people happen in a pre-defined and specified way. In order to solve conflicts we discuss our opinions or give up the talking at all, in order to compete we develop rules in defined places, in order to talk we introduce ourselves. In the game interaction happens both; mediated digitally and face-to-face and it is going to be interesting to see how new conventions emerge and will be established among the group.
Copyright (C) 2005 by exNeMo Group, University Bremen - All rights reserved
Last change on this page: 30.11.2005