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Serious Game May Help Track Missing Kids
Posted by
Zonk
on Sunday April 22, @01:20AM
from the fun-and-socially-responsible dept.
from the fun-and-socially-responsible dept.
GameSpot reports on a title announced at this year's Women Games conference. A University of East London project called Lost and Found may bring some sense of social responsibility to gamers when it is eventually rolled out to cell phones. Much like PeaceBomb , the game envisioned by Harvey Smith at the 2006 Game Designer's Challenge, Lost and Found will try to assist gamers in finding missing people via smart-mob activities. "Users can, for example, sign up for alerts when someone goes missing in their area, and if they see someone who resembles a photo of a missing child, take a photo, which will alert authorities to the possibility that an abducted child is nearby. The game will also present people with a series of objectives and mobilize groups to block roads and search fields."
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For the past three years, Eric Zimmerman (of the gameLab group) has brought together a trio of designers to tackled a difficult game concept. Last year's Emily Dickinson challenge was a surreal poetry experience. This year Mr. Zimmerman took a more serious tack, by putting forward the concept of 'The Nobel Peace Prize' for the participants to ponder. Read on for notes on the presentations from Harvey Smith, CliffyB, and Keita Takahashi.
Serious Game May Help Track Missing Kids
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Roadblocks?!
(Score:5, Interesting)what?
(Score:5, Insightful)While I appreciate the idea, i don't see many people dropping what they're doing to trek across town look for someone.
Now there could be a downside with the kidnapper getting the "game" and then avoiding the areas spotlighted by the search area and knowing precisely how fast it took authorities to realize that the kid was missing.
Sounds good...
(Score:2)What a fabulous game, MMORPG "Hide and Seek"
(Score:2)(http://www.milksucks.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 15, @01:30PM)
What Laws would I be breaking. "Pretending to be missing, Felony 1"
Lost: Level 24 bar-room skulker. Blue coat with orange hat. Coat says "Barf y2k" on the back.
Lost: Level 2 Teen. Black hair, black clothes, black nails, black lipstick, black eyeshadow, black eyeliner, black mascara, white face. Answers to no name at all. Length of disappearance: Unknown. Please find him.
Who comes up with this stuff?
(Score:4, Insightful)Sounds like infrastructure
(Score:1)(http://rosettacode.org/ | Last Journal: Friday April 13, @12:00AM)
Sounds like fun
(Score:2)It better be millions because the chance of me finding a real world lost child is near zero.
The creator claims that this is a game because they "use an avatar". That's not a game, that's a UI.
The NRA "buddy beacon"
(Score:3, Interesting)(http://www.animats.com)
The red state version of this would be Helio's "Buddy Beacon" for NRA members. If you're in trouble, you punch the panic button on your cell phone, and all NRA members within a mile or so get an alert. In two minutes there's enough firepower on site for a small war.
Needs good authentication
(Score:2)You probably don't want people able to report a suspected missing child too casually.
The base rate fallacy guarantees most reports of missing children are going to be false alarms. (Look at the number of children, vs. the number of missing children). If you make this reporting too easy, then the authorities can get swamped chasing down the false leads.
On the other hand, if several different people (known to not be sock-puppets of one another, or closely related) were to report a suspected missing child through this interface, the central collection of the data could flag that. That set of reports would be significantly less likely to be false alarms.
Re:Serious
(Score:2)