I arrive in Chicago just after noon on Friday the 13th. Nah, I’m not superstitious. But knowing that my journey was to begin on Friday the 13th helped me remember to get all that accumulated work done so I would be ready to travel. The flight left San Francisco at 6am – so Thursday nightconsisted of packing and a little over 3 hours’ sleep, and then up at 3:45 for the ride to the airport. San Francisco International airport is actually a pretty civilized place at 4:30 in the morning – people are drowsy and polite. The lines are tolerable, especially for the self-check-in, meaning that I could walk right up to a kiosk, punch the touch-screen with my finger a few times and I was ready to go within a minute.
Having spent the first half of my years in Chicago, I was used to the flight. Kind of like commuting. Chicago is so central to the US that it’s a perfect base of operations – you can get anywhere in the country in 4 or 5 hours. Of course, I measure flight length in terms of “computer battery capacity.” This is a one-and-a-half-battery flight, as measured by my current Mac Powerbook. Day flights are “longer” because I have to keep the display brightness cranked up (draining the battery faster), whereas night flights measure shorter because I can dim the screen, thus saving the battery. I can squeeze three hours out of a single battery on a night flight.
“Pervasive Games” are games that are played out in real life, but directed by an unseen presence which in our case is a computer program. (There are lots of forms of pervasive games – many involved real life puppet masters, who work behind the scenes to invent (on-the-fly) new puzzles and to adapt the game to those who are playing it. Some games are one-time-only, designed for a group who will play the game and then it’ll never be played again – we designed and played one of these one-timers in Palo Alto this summer. Red7 pervasive games are based on a complex piece of software that runs on our servers, and is driven by a game scenario, composed of a set of rules that the software uses to determine what the players do at each step along the way.
