Sharkrunners
27 07 2007When I met up again with Kevin Slavin in NYC last week, he told me about a new game they were creating for Discovery Channel which sounded very interesting. The game is part of Shark Week and I had a chance to play it for a few days and I must say it’s quite original.
Kevin got me interested in it when he told me that in the online game, you would have to navigate your own boat on a map whereas the sharks you need to find & research are not controlled by artificial intelligence or whatsoever, they are real sharks. The game is using live data from real sharks with GPS tracking (for research purposes) that are swimming in that area. I liked that approach.
When you set your boat’s waypoints the game continues while youre away as you can easily set up a trip for several hours. Whenever there’s a shark within range (like in the image above) you will get an email to warn you about that. That gives you 3 hours to log in and react.
You can request some information about the sharks you encounter, especially to see what data you have already collected and what not (see image above). If you need more research you get your crew ready to collect that.
There are several ways to collect data (some of which you have to buy) but the most effective in the beginning seems to be the 1-person dive. It says that comes with very high danger, but only one crew member has been injured so far ;)
Last but not least, when you collect data on each shark, for instance on habitat, you get a short info on what it is that you actually learned together with a short video of that. No long learning pieces in between, but easy to digest ‘clips’ that you do watch. That makes the game complete for me. It’s not just a fun game just to promote a tv show, it incorporates some content into it already.
Good stuff from the area/code crew!
Technorati Tags: sharks, areacode, playareacode, game, online, promotion, shark week, discovery channel, kevin slavin
Interesting find indeed!
I wonder how the sharks feel about it?
Did you know that sharks are facing extinction? Crazy stuff that I wrote about here just yesterday:
http://www.ck-blog.com/cks_blog/2007/07/learning-to-lov.html
@CK: read your post yesterday, bad news indeed, quite amazing animals
@Luc: I’m pretty sure the GPS tracking is for researching purposes, hopefully to learn more about sharks and how to protect them from extinction. The game just taps into that data.
We don’t get Discovery Channel here, but I guess they will highlight the extinction issue, let me know is somebody is going to watch it.
Of course… I was just wondering how deep data would try to understand behavior of sharks… and eventually check if they were also tracking us (tracking them).
@Luc: I reckon the sharks have a similar game as this one on their waterproof pc’s or something ;)
[...] Sharkrunners cool game with live data from real sharks (tags: game lifesize sharks live data) [...]
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