- Play your way to work (Image: Rex Features)
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Chad Toprak of the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues have developed a game called Cart-Load-o-Fun that can be installed on buses, trains or trams.
"Back in the 70s we had games arcades," he says. "People would gather and a community would build up." But today people play games either at home or in a private bubble on their phones. Toprak wants to put games back into public space.
Cart-Load-o-Fun is similar to Pac-Man and involves two players who must work together to move a dot around on a screen, picking up gems and avoiding enemies. The players control the dot by squeezing special pads fixed to the overhead handholds on a tram. One player moves the dot left and right, the other up and down.
The movement of the tram is part of the fun because players have to steady themselves with the handholds while playing. "Passengers found it amusing," says Toprak's colleague Floyd Mueller, also at RMIT University. "Even the driver was involved." They discussed the work at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Chania, Greece, last week.
It's not all fun and games, though. The tram company likes the game because it encourages people to hold on to the bars. "Games also make people perceive that their journey goes faster," says Mueller. This element has attracted the attention of a Melbourne ferry company that has spent a lot of money trying to cut down its journey times. Simply changing people's commute with a game may be enough to keep them using the service.
Commuter games could also reduce congestion on overcrowded transport networks. Chromaroma, for example, turns the data collected every time you check in or out of a station on the London Underground into game stats. Players win points for passing through certain stations or they can compete for the fastest time between stops. Transport for London is interested in the game's potential for crowd control. Players could be rewarded for avoiding congested stations, for example, or for getting off one stop before their destination.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Take the pain out of the train, play an interactive game"