Bluetooth Games

Description

We discussed a number of possible games to test. These included:

Collecting Bluetooth IDs - counting how many unique IDs you can collect in a given time.

Stalking, chasing and hunting
- trying to stay in contact with a Bluetooth ID
- trying to identify the person carrying a Bluetooth ID Passing Virtual Objects Hiding
- finding ways to physically shield your Bluetooth ID Link: OGI
- Bluetooth GPS game? the context

These were the ones we chose to try:

Test 1: Sabiha & Matt
2 Phone players see how many unique Bluetooth IDs they can collect in a given time.

Test 2: Nick/Adam & Ju/Irma
2 pairs of players collaborate using Walkie-Talkies, to collect Bluetooth IDs. Between them they try to identify the owner of an ID among a crowd.

Location: Nottingham City Centre on a busy Christmas shopping afternoon

What was it like?

Test 1: 10 mins

Matt collected 16 IDs.
Sabiha collected 18 IDs.

About half the devices appeared to use the default phone model as an ID.

Custom Bluetooth IDs included:

Donnie
SpugMan 
Daddy
AlteredBeast
Strum!
0001E30C4E87
KIOSK
Bec
Thinkb4unzipping
Gurb!
DAVE
Mg
Bizzymum

Test Logs: Matt's phone | Sabiha's phone

Test 2: 45mins

Trying to identify the owner of a Bluetooth ID among 100's of Christmas shoppers proved impossible. The list of devices in range seemed to update only intermittently.

Strategies to spot the owners of IDs included
- one team stopping with the other walking ahead to see who lost contact with a particular ID first
- positioning the 2 teams at each end of a walkway to see if we could identify someone walking from the ID appearing in range of one team to the other.

None of these strategies proved enough to even come close to identifying ID owners.

Our chances might have increased by moving to less crowded areas and more slow moving areas.

Using 2 phones side by side to collect IDs, we often had 2 very different lists of what IDs appeared to be in range.

Ju/Irma - 55 IDs (in 45mins) with a maximum of 12 devices simultaneously
Nick/Adam - 21 IDs (in 25mins)

Custom Bluetooth IDs included:

Jodi
DrDre
Jen
www.djTNS.com
MyPhone
JeffCapes
2Kings
10Bellies
Fuckyou

Test Logs: Nick/Adam's phone | Ju/Irma's phone

Sabiha's Feedback - I didn't get the impression of a game when I played this game, it was interesting to find out how many people walk around with their bluetooth enabled but since there didn't seem to be a purposed or reason to do so (other then finding out the number of devices) I didn't enjoyed that as much as the other games.

How could it develop?

Using Bluetooth to find specific people might be impractical outside of a few specific situations. It suggests working with activity that isn't dependent on finding particular IDs and uses IDs on a more anonymous level.

For example, something that requires repeated presence in an area so that IDs become familiar even if people aren't.

Or use the behaviour of IDs on a more anonymous level, how quickly or slowly IDs change in a given area.