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by nonrandomstring 623 days ago
Not so much addiction but worrying misuse. My heads-up on the whole smart-tech and human behaviour crisis happened very early. About 2014 we were at RJDJ pioneering reactive music and audio games. Two products, gave me serious worry. One was a zombie hunting game, possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games way before Pokemon etc. It used audio only and put the player into an immersive horror survival landscape. Invisible zombies out there in the world would converge on you to do battle. The accelerometer controlled virtual weapons with swishing and flesh impact sound effect, and also the music got super intense. People would be flailing wildly in the street, frightening passers by and sometimes letting go and smashing their phone (same problem Wii controllers had). Another one was a reactive music game for in car use that created generative drum and bass according to how you drive. That basically ended up with people taking stupid risks to get the music fired up.

Both of those were an early wake-up call for me that the shit we were playing with where digital meets reality and human behaviour, was way more than just "entertainment".
2 comments
seba_dos1 623 days ago
> possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games

The first geo-location mobile game I used to play (Xyber Mech) was from 2004; it was inspired by BotFighters from 2001, and Ingress was released in 2012 making a global craze, so I don't think you could be "one of the first ever" in 2014 ;) Pokemon Go, while certainly the most popular, was really late to the party.

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nonrandomstring 623 days ago
As you get older it all starts to blend :) Would have actually been more like 2010 [0] as I remember the iPhone 4 was the next target [1] and my job was to get all the DSP running on it. But you're absolutely right, the idea of GPS games is way, way older. Some of the team then were into "geocashing" sort of games and that's what inspired the musical zombies thing. IIRC they didn't all use "smartphones" either because not all models had GPS then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj [1] https://www.iphonelife.com/content/evolution-iphone-every-mo...

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throwaway18284 623 days ago
Ah man, I love the RJDJ apps! I keep an ancient iPod touch around just because it has some of them on it. :)
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