Large-Scale Real-World Computer Gaming

I've said it previously: IT Conversations is an amazing source of some really informative and inspiring content. The people who produce their gaming content must have been busy a couple days ago. In addition to the Steven Johnson talk, they had a talk about large-scale, real-word gaming with Kevin Slavin of area/code.

As of the time of this talk, they were touring a city-sized treasure hunting game called ConQwest. They roll into each scheduled city, set up all their huge inflatable animal markers, install semacodes (the treasure) in all sorts of visible and hidden places, test it, then start up the game. It sounds like an amazing feat. Players are issued camera phones and a few clues. As they find the semacodes, they take its picture, MMS it to the game server, and the game server sends the player an SMS with more clues.

It sounds like it would be as much fun to design, setup, and run as it would be to play. They had done other big games as well, but ConQwest seemed to be their most technologically advanced so far. With my penchant for server-side programming, and more recently mobile programming, I could really get into developing projects like this. Who wants a new project? (As if I could afford the time for yet another project.)