Blossom Bristol Will Be Bloomin’ Fun

Here at Mobile Pie we make games. Games can be about making you sad or angry, but mostly, other than the standout exceptions, they're about engaging people by being fun. They get you drawn in, making you seek out the constructions of their world for the sake of exceeding in it.

Data. It's numbers in rows and columns. Not so fun. But data is always crucial to making games work. The representation of data in a game constructs the world that you project yourself into. It defines and shapes it. To exceed in a game world you need to understand it. To understand it you need to, consciously or not, engage with it's data. Understand its patterns, its shapes and its forms.

So, what happens if you take live and historic real world data and put it in to a game? What if that data is location tied and the gaming platform portable, creating an explorable virtual world? Can you get people who profess to have no interest in some data, interested in it through play? Can you get those players to link the data to real, tangible effects in the world? Can you get people to consider why and how their actions or the actions of other people or organisations can be effecting the data and thus their living, breathing environment?

These are big questions. Big questions Mobile Pie would like answers to. We hope that they will be found somewhere within Blossom Bristol and the reactions of those that interact with it.

BB will use GPS-enabled mobile phones and open data sets (including those from Bristol City Council) to model a persistent, changing ecosystem. Virtual crops will fail in poor weather where pollution is high, but thrive where water is good and the sun shines.

We will engage players through popular, proven play mechanics such as those seen in Foursquare and Farmville and encouraged everyone to explore their environment, consider its character and shape its future.

Over the coming months as we build and test BB for Android handsets we will share our thoughts and progress on this blog. We think it's going to be an interesting and exciting journey, which will shape our thinking and, hopefully, the future of play as proponent of change.