STOCKHOLM — There is a taxi driver from Stockholm known by the web alias Taxi31 who spends all his time between passengers shooting people. In Copenhagen, fierce street battles break out daily between dozens of young people. The killing occurs with cell phones, not guns, courtesy of new technologies that allow cell phone users to locate each other within several hundred meters.
Two small companies, Sweden’s It’s Alive and Denmark’s Wireless Factory, have carved out early positions in a new genre of location-based games and entertainment that will likely soon expand from Europe to North America.
“We believe location-based entertainment and commerce will be the reason for being of mobile Internet,” said Anders Kjærsgaard Sørensen, CEO of Unwired Factory.
Other companies creating games for the format include Sweden’s Blue Factory and two Israeli companies: Valis and Iniru.
The games are based on cell phone technology that allows mobile operators to pinpoint users’ positions within “cells” formed by the location of their phones relative to nearby transmitters. In the United States, that capability is now required for all mobile operators to ensure that rescue workers can locate mobile users in trouble.
The technologies also enable the creation of location-based games that bring people close enough to raise their adrenaline levels, but not so close that they feel harassed.
“If someone could actually track you and find you, it would be too scary,” said It’s Alive CEO Sven Hålling.
The company’s flagship game is BotFighters, which Hålling says has attracted between 7,000 and 8,000 players in Sweden and Finland. The game will soon be released in Ireland.
In BotFighters, users play roles as robots choosing from a community website. They can choose all kinds of extras, such as laser guns and missiles, using play money called “Robucks.”
But once they start shooting each other in the real world, they pay real money: about 20 cents for every move in the game. (Mobile phones can “fetch” missions from company servers, “scan” for nearby enemies, and, of course, “shoot.”)
Since intense battles often involve a lot of movement, games can quickly rack up large phone bills.
