MobZombies Are After You

How's this for a new twist on the “Living Dead.”

MobZombies is a new location-based mobile game that pits players against virtual zombies. The conceit is that the movement of your onscreen avatar correlates with that of yours in the physical world. If flesh eating zombies corner your avatar, the only way to escape may be for you to physically run in the opposite direction. Which means you're hosed if running away means jutting across a lake or crossing the street on a red light.

MobZombies is a project funded by the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, and may take a while to hit the streets, so to speak. But in BRANDING UNBOUND, I talk a lot about the emerging arena of virtual/real world games, including Uncle Roy All Around You, where teams of street and online players try to find a fictional character within a real city.

Longer term, I think this sort of thing could transform the nature of gameplay, leveraging the spontaneity they mobility affords, while turning the real world into a brick and mortar Holodek where victory in Doom, Quake, and other games depends on physical prowess instead of (just) the ability to jockey a joystick.