Globe & Mail - Scott Colbourne – July 22, 2005
When Joel Friesen moved to Toronto from Victoria 18 months ago, he came up with a novel idea to help him master the city’s public transportation system.
The 27-year-old graphic designer invented something called Live Action Scotland Yard, taking the basic elements of a popular board game and applying them to real subway stations and streets. Players, with the help of cellphones and dispatchers at a centralized headquarters, would act as detectives tracking down the mysterious Mr. X, who would leave clues as he jumped from train to train.
Friesen, however, had a problem, not an uncommon one for a newcomer to any big city — he couldn’t find enough people to play with him.
“The game last year just ended up with us drinking beers,” he says, nicely summarizing roughly half of all Canadian attempts at socializing.
This year’s version, scheduled for tomorrow, is not going to have participation problems: Early this week, an item about the game was featured on Slashdot.com, which dishes out what it calls “news for nerds” to an army of on-line readers. Friesen says he has found more than enough volunteers to don bright yellow T-shirts and take to the subways.
If all goes according to plan, Friesen and friends will join an eclectic community of adults playing games that require a little more effort than pulling the Clue box out of the jam cupboard. You might be surprised how many people could quickly tell you that LARP stands for live action role-playing, in which participants act out scenarios in character. (Check out http://www.larpaweb.net/wiki for a rundown of this particular school of gaming, including a lively explanation of “live combat v. abstract combat.” Sadly, there are very few pictures.)
Lately, these live-action games have begun to use technological gadgets such as global-positioning units and cellphones to add another layer to the fun: the control room. Last year, graduate students at New York University devised Pac-Manhattan, which featured runners dressed as the circular chomper and ghosts from the popular eighties arcade game. The players were guided by coaches tracking their movements across the city with GPS and specially written software, and the game was broadcast over the Internet in real time.
Friesen caught the bug playing a slightly less involved game — a citywide capture-the-flag contest — in Victoria almost a decade ago. He says Pac-Manhattan inspired his Scotland Yard experiment, but he wanted to keep his board-game adaptation accessible by making the only barriers to entry “a transit day pass and a cellphone that gives you a lot of minutes on the weekend.”
Soon after Slashdot featured Friesen’s idea, posters questioned the playing of games with public transportation so soon after the attacks in London. Friesen says he planned the game well in advance of the attacks and he is determined to go ahead with the city-scale adventure. He will call the Toronto Transit Commission to tell them not to worry about the people in bright shirts scanning subway platforms for clues.
“We’re not doing anything that people who use the TTC don’t do already — almost everyone uses a cellphone,” he says. “I think we’re safe enough in this country that we can do this now.”
