Along the lines of a standard scavenger hunt type deal, we ended up creating paperquest, a persistent game that has several ‘teams’ each beginning with an empty book being dropped at a unique location for the taking. Each book has unique guidelines requesting that the new player modifies the book in some way and relocates it with the purpose of the book’s continued journey. A simple website allows players to document their modifications, track the new location and also invites new players to find a book that is in play and join a team.

A major design challenge of these type of games is getting players involved initially and keeping them active. Since the website plays an integral role in locating players in the game, its somewhat problematic. We used the standard google maps api to create an interface for user to track and located the books.

Here are the rules:

Chris Paretti, Dan Phiffer, Oren Ross, Ran Tao and myself thought about it for awhile and gave it a shot.

» Games, Other