How do you play a shared game on fields in two cities in real-time?

The Scramble Project, a collaboration between OCAD's Mobile Experience Lab and Concordia University, is a co-located word game where players in Toronto and Montreal simultaneously rearrange letters on a virtual field based on their movements on a physical field. The object of the game is simple: to spell a word. The challenge is for players to position themselves by physically moving to place letters in their correct order

while coordinating their movements with other players in a separate city. The physical field can be anchored to anywhere the two teams decide.

Users can see the movements of others on their screens and adjust their own movement accordingly. A mobile web server was developed to register the relative positions of the players via GPS and feed back this information to  displays on their respective mobile devices.

Basic game-play functionality has been completed, several levels of difficulty have been planned for future development, user-testing and analysis.

Principal Investigators:
Sara Diamond
President, Ontario College of Art & Design

Michael Longford
Concordia University

Lead Researchers:
Geoffrey Shea
Professor, Ontario College of Art & Design

Paula Gardner, PhD
Assistant Dean, Ontario College of Art & Design

Daviid Gauthier
Games Programmer/Researcher, Concordia University

Documentation:
Scramble: Co-Located, Real-Time, Locative Word Game (PDF)