ZapitSMS Blog

One of the purposes of this blog was to toss around ideas for how to use ZapitSMS in innovative and creative ways. An idea that I’ll be pursuing is the use of SMS in real life quest-like games.

Just by way of an explanation, there are groups around the world (such as those that play real life Pacman or even water-gun bounty hunting) that have sophisticated communication needs but can’t rely on those competing to have equally sophisticated gadgets. In situations like this SMS, as one of the most common communication protocols in the world, would be ideal.

Let’s make a game shall we?

Say there was a significant prize for the person who was able to track down and identify a certain person (the target) at a certain time, with clues being given to competitors when certain objectives are complete. They follow that trail of clues until a competitor or team of competitors successfully ‘captures’ the target.

While this may be an overly simplistic game, let’s have a look at the logistics of distributing clues to contestants.

Having human beings at pre-determined locations to hand out printed clues would be prohibitively expensive and require far too much preparation.

Walkie-talkies would be an effective way of coordinating a single group of people over a relatively confined region, but wouldn’t cope with a competitive group and wouldn’t scale to the area of a large city. Likewise they would be an expensive outlay for the game’s organisers.

Phone calls would be equally expensive and unless pre-recorded messages were used, the game would need a small call centre for any decently sized number of contestants.

Micro-blogging tools like Twitter would work if all contestants had phones with decent web access but this isn’t widely adopted enough yet to be fair on everyone that wanted to join in.

Given the fast paced or even heavy duty requirements of such games, it seems unlikely that any of these are an adequate option for communication and coordination. SMS beats these systems hands down because of;

• The low cost of sending a text messages
• The universal ability for phones to send and receive SMS
• The ultimately scalable range of SMS and
• The fact that one person could use a ZapitSMS console to coordinate an incredible number of inbound and outbound messages.

It goes without saying that trying to coordinate a game like this using a mobile phone would be beyond the capabilities of most, if not all mobile phone users, even if their phone had a QWERTY keyboard. That’s where the ZapitSMS interface comes in.

While I’ve used the example of a game here, it’s not hard to imagine how it would work equally well for other events, such as organising marshals for a cross country run or bike race. In the end though, making SMS easier to use opens up a number of possibilities of which this is only one.