Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Scavenger hunts can take on a whole new dimension through a mobile phone. A great old-school example is PacManhattan, a large scale urban game executed in NYC back in 2004. Now we are seeing this sort of gameplay brought to the masses, first with SCVNGR and now with a new platform called New York: The Game. The latter is an SMS-based service launched by Stray Boots that offers two to three hour trips and challenges in 10 world-famous neighborhoods.

Paper Magazine has an interesting take on the game's ability to encourage serendipity. Nell Alk reflects on life before smartphone based conveniences like mobile search and turn-by-turn navigation.

Operating sans iPhone or Blackberry, my partner-in-crime and I hadn't any opportunity to Google what we didn't know and took the sporadic point deductions in stride. We wandered aimlessly, made mistakes, laughed it off, and high-fived each time we got one right. This occupied us for hours, from mid-afternoon 'til nearly 9, trekking from Washington Square Park to Stonewall Street and everywhere in between and beyond.

Nell continues to describe the adventures, stumbling across a variety of interesting landmarks and locations that have always been there but otherwise overlooked. The value of exploration is summed up in one sentence: "It was one of my more memorable afternoons spent in New York to date."

Apps like Google Maps serve their purpose well, but there is a consequence to increased efficiency. Today, we have to make an effort to get lost and stumble across interesting new places. But there are solutions. Foursquare was created to "motivate people to discover interesting things around them." Gowallahashing, inspired by xkcd's geohashing, a Spontaneous Adventure Generator, uses an algorithm to spit out specific coordinates to explore. It's with this and creations like Stray Boots' The Game that the same tools that confine us are also used to enable and revive serendipity.