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The user

At the end of the working week Paul enjoys interacting with his children by getting them active in outdoor pursuits; along the way engaging the children with family orientated games. These types of games involve active exploration and discovery of a location and making them more aware of their surroundings.

In the past Paul has tried and tested many types of these activities such as Geocaching treasure hunting and orienteering at the moment these activities determine the destination where he is to take his children. The game shouldn’t dictate where they go; Paul should have the flexibility to determine the location of the game to accompany them on their family outing. The family require an activity where they can design and play a game in a location of their choosing Big Game Huntr a Nokia S60 5th edition application (5800 N97 X6...) that utilises the phones GPS to allow Paul and his family to design and create their own location based game to be played along their chosen journey.

The experience

Big Game Huntr; a mobile location based game which encourages emergent behavior by allowing the general public to design their own games around any subject to be played in a place of their own choosing.

Players are required to capture photos on their Nokia mobile device, of specified objects or actions and points are awarded depending on the location in which they take the photo.

Big Game Huntr is designed to utilise existing social relationships in Twitter and Twitpic to increase awareness of the game and incorporate user play into everyday life, this means Paul’s Big Game Huntr experience will be shared through social networks. BigGameHuntr.com is where you can create your own event in a location of your choice, set a list of clues, and choose the zones you want to use and finally strategically positioning your zones on the map.

If Paul didn’t want to setup his own event he could play other events setup by other users (this is the beauty of BigGameHuntr if you’re in an area where a game has already been setup why not participate in that game?). Upon login to the mobile client, the list of events available and the player’s current position are retrieved.

Once the event a player wishes to play has been selected; their location is plotted onto a map and they are provided with an interface that is simple to use and consistent with other map applications. To score maximum points the player must move into the defined zones and upload photos relating to the clues for that event. The players select the clue they wish to take a photo of and upload the photo to the Big Game Huntr website. If a player has logged into the game with their Twitter account details then the game data will be posted on Twitter and their photo uploaded to Twitpic.

Now Paul has Big Game Huntr to engage his children whenever and wherever they wish.