While thousands of Americans were quietly nursing their two-day New Year’s hangover, I was racing through the streets of downtown San Francisco with one eye on my iPhone and the other frantically searching for people in colorful holiday-themed costumes.
Which, if you replace the words “searching for” with “avoiding” doesn’t sound all that far from my morning commute.
But, this was not rush hour. I was participating in the Loopt Holiday Scavenger Crawl – supposedly part scavenger hunt and part pub crawl, though during the activity itself there was certainly more hunting than drinking. The premise was similar to the website SCVNGR.com (also covered by TechCrunch a few months back) in that it was – you guessed it – a scavenger hunt with mobile phones.
Participants were given game instructions and the phone number of a “Loopt Agent” to serve as the starting point for their journey. After adding the Agent as a Loopt friend, they used clues from their journal to determine where in downtown the Agent was currently located. After finding the Agent (the holiday costumes helped) they would be required to fulfill some kind of task (some examples were making a stranger laugh, reciting something Irish and calling your mother), which would earn Loopt buttons, drink tickets for the after-party and/or nothing, depending on whether the Agent had any supplies left. (By the second hour, inventory was quite low.) Answering a riddle based on the location would then get you the remaining digits of the next Agent’s phone number, and the cycle would repeat itself until the time was up.
The game itself would have benefited from working out a few kinks and simplifying the rules, but it was engaging and fun. Prior to the event I had downloaded Loopt once when I first purchased my iPhone and never touched it again, but by the end of the scavenger hunt I felt that I had a strong understanding of its features and interface. I’m not sure whether I’ll use it or not – despite my love of technology I’m not much for apps that broadcast my actual location – but there are certainly participants who may increase their usage after the event (a couple of my friends already have). A few events alone aren’t going to cause Loopt to overtake Foursquare, but it was refreshing to see some creative marketing. I’ll be interested to see what they do with the website LooptGames.com in the future.
Above everything, though, there was one previous lesson that came back to me with a smack in the face that day: iPhone batteries die damn fast when you’re using them non-stop. Ouch.
Which, if you replace the words “searching for” with “avoiding” doesn’t sound all that far from my morning commute.
But, this was not rush hour. I was participating in the Loopt Holiday Scavenger Crawl – supposedly part scavenger hunt and part pub crawl, though during the activity itself there was certainly more hunting than drinking. The premise was similar to the website SCVNGR.com (also covered by TechCrunch a few months back) in that it was – you guessed it – a scavenger hunt with mobile phones.
Participants were given game instructions and the phone number of a “Loopt Agent” to serve as the starting point for their journey. After adding the Agent as a Loopt friend, they used clues from their journal to determine where in downtown the Agent was currently located. After finding the Agent (the holiday costumes helped) they would be required to fulfill some kind of task (some examples were making a stranger laugh, reciting something Irish and calling your mother), which would earn Loopt buttons, drink tickets for the after-party and/or nothing, depending on whether the Agent had any supplies left. (By the second hour, inventory was quite low.) Answering a riddle based on the location would then get you the remaining digits of the next Agent’s phone number, and the cycle would repeat itself until the time was up.
The game itself would have benefited from working out a few kinks and simplifying the rules, but it was engaging and fun. Prior to the event I had downloaded Loopt once when I first purchased my iPhone and never touched it again, but by the end of the scavenger hunt I felt that I had a strong understanding of its features and interface. I’m not sure whether I’ll use it or not – despite my love of technology I’m not much for apps that broadcast my actual location – but there are certainly participants who may increase their usage after the event (a couple of my friends already have). A few events alone aren’t going to cause Loopt to overtake Foursquare, but it was refreshing to see some creative marketing. I’ll be interested to see what they do with the website LooptGames.com in the future.
Above everything, though, there was one previous lesson that came back to me with a smack in the face that day: iPhone batteries die damn fast when you’re using them non-stop. Ouch.
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