GPS cellphones to unleash gamers onto the streets - tech - 05 August 2008 - New Scientist Tech

GPS cellphones to unleash gamers onto the streets - tech - 05 August 2008 - New Scientist Tech:

"But being able to discover the physical location of other people has downsides. Researchers at Portsmouth University have had to abandon GPS games projects because they cannot get approval from the ethics committee.

'Already there are social networking applications for the GPS iPhone which let you see where other iPhone users are,' says Andy Bain, lecturer at Portsmouth University's School of Creative Technologies. 'If I were a thief I'd abuse that knowledge right away to get myself more iPhones.'

Commercial games developers are not subject to the same ethical scrutiny as academics, he adds. It could be left to their customers to work out how to avoid anti-social gamers."

I don't know anything about gaming or social activities — I'm an old-school geek. But... Given that phone GPS is supposed to be accurate to within a few meters only, it's easy to imagine "wave function" games which rely on GPS. Such games might show the locations of participants as spheres, to indicate the GPS error. It would fall to the players to collapse the wave functions (find the other players).

I could lose a lot of money creating dull GPS-based games. "Never mind whether it's alive or dead, where is Schrödinger's Cat?" "Bohrtherford — Find the electron." Etc.

Best to lie down until the urge goes away.

"But think about this. Supposing you were to introduce a psychic, someone with clairvoyant powers, into the experiment — someone who is able to divine what state of health the cat is in without opening the box. Someone who has, perhaps, a certain eerie sympathy with cats. What then? Might that furnish us with an additional insight into the problem of quantum physics?"

"Dirk, this is complete nonsense."

-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams