Just before Christmas I took part in Beyond the Screen, speaking about “walls.” In a normal physical environment a wall is designed to keep people in (or out), and normally works very well. In a video game, the wall work even better, in that there are no ways to break the rules – the keys or mouse action just won’ t let you do it – think PacMan as an example.
In outdoor games, such as our Fruit Farmer, where a maze can be created using a wall (symbolically a fence, but we won’t quibble), the player can, of course, physically ignore this and run through it.
Obviously, because we know the GPS position, we know when the player runs through but we can’t stop it (not until we have the Bluetooth enabled Tazer). Our solution to this is to stop the game and tell the player to go back to the last legal spot before they can begin again.
But there are some fascinating possibilities that we could program in, and hopefully when we open the API, some of you will want to try some of these. The first is a strategic maneuver where there is a penalty for crossing a wall, but being penalised might outweigh the cost of going round. This is like the real-life situation where you have walked along a path for 5 miles only to be confronted by a barbed-wire fence. Do you go back, or do you risk your trousers (or worse) in making an attempt to cross. More wall possibilities tomorrow.
