(by @Readywater)
Games are very natural for us. Ernest Adams describes the fundamentals of a game as a “type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretend reality, in which the participants try to achieve at least one arbitrary, non-trivial goal by acting in accordance with rules.” He also describes game reality as enclosed within a “magic circle” where participants mutually agree to abide by the value and constraints of that game. It doesn’t take a big leap to extend this description outwards, looking at life, institutions, politics, etc. as extensions of the same principal; the value of that being a support for our natural inclination to create and to imagine.
Geospatial games aren’t new, but they’re becoming a lot more interesting thanks to ubiquity of mobile devices with awareness of space and location. Foursquare and Gowalla are great examples of services built around those features, and games like Mob Zombie leverage those services to inform the game environment. 
Problem is, Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t games, but instead services which use game-like principals to motivate. Foursquare takes the action of “Check ins” as its primary interaction, we want to see what the next steps are. So what can we do to build upon the amazing work in this space?
One of the big questions I’ve had from this project has been how to control the magic circle in a geospatial context. The whole concept of the fourth wall in video games feels like an extension of this, where we need to very consciously control the flow between the “real-world” and the “game.” Whether it’s Max* chiding us for breaking Sam’s spirits or Metal Gear Solid trying desperately to convince us that we’re in a video game, there seems to be a lot of leeway in how video games and reality blend. I’ve begun to think that in the geospatial context, any kind of game needs to look to its interface to be that fourth wall: neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but instead filtering our view into (and out from) the magic circle. Whether it acts as a lens or a stained glass window is up to the designer, provided that it serves a role as filter and not sandbox.
Many mobile games use the “Sandbox” (More this sandbox than that sandbox) principal, 
keeping the magic circles within the device itself. Geospatially aware games necessarily break from this: the game can’t exist within a sandbox because the sandbox precludes external awareness. By making a mobile game aware of the world, the scope of the magic circle can extend indefinitely: the source of the game’s rules and value are no longer the device, but instead something on top of the reality we know. And in the same way that the introduction of electric lighting drastically altered our perception of architecture and living space, we’ve the opportunity here to drastically change the way that players perceive their surroundings.
Red Rover is a research project and we’re keeping it simple out of necessity, but it’s also something that we’re quite passionate about, and become more so every day. I’ve worked in the new media space before, but it’s the early childhood gaming on my dad’s Apple IIe, 3D studio max in middle/highschool, and video games from Police Quest (Still remember the Jessie Bains code to get in) to Rez which have informed how I interact, create, and play _through_ computers. It’s hard coming from consuming rich, developed, and complex media to trying to making something as parred down, simple, and polished as possible (Simple is really, really hard). But to be honest, we’ll have failed if we don’t succeed at simple and failure in this first step is like not getting the Chrono doll at the beginning of the game, right?
* Was it just me, or was discovering Sam in Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 2) just about the weirdest fourth wall break ever?
