The iTron Family of Geocast Games

Abstract — Geocast games are a new class of digital multiplayer games, inherently involving vigorous physical activity in outdoor natural settings such as parks, camps, or athletic fields. They are designed for commercial location-aware smartphones carried or worn by players, without requiring consoles or internet connections. The iTron Family of geocast games illustrates how physical athletic play can be combined with real-time strategic, imaginative, and creative cognitive play from the domain of digital games to produce sports of the future appealing to a wide range of ever more sophisticated players. This paper describes the family and its variation points, as well as its implementation in a smartphone prototype, and an initial evaluation. 1 Index Terms — Geocast, digital games, iTron, smartphone, sports of the future, athletics