I presented this talk at Geo Ignite in San Francisco. It's about an experimental video game that I developed while an art student in San Francisco. It's sort of Zelda-meets-Geocaching: you have to explore a virtual game world to talk to people and learn a bunch of stuff, but the game uses your GPS to move you around the virtual world. It also uses realtime weather services from wunderground.com to overlay the real-world weather & fog conditions onto the virtual map.

1. Fear of Fog
Geo Ignite
16 May 2013
Thursday, May 16, 13

2. About Me
• Originally from the Bay Area
• Worked as a developer/hacker until 2011
• Graduating with an MFA in Fine Arts this
week
• Graduate Show is up at the Old Mint right
now
Thursday, May 16, 13

3. Fear of Fog
• Free iPhoneVideo Game
• Artisanal / Indie - I did everything myself.
Code, design, art.
• ExperimentalVideo Game/Art Project
Thursday, May 16, 13

4. Richard Garriott’s Ultima
Thursday, May 16, 13

5. Ultimate San Francisco
16 Color Silkscreen Print
Thursday, May 16, 13

6. Geolocative Gaming
• Fear of Fog is an RPG based in San
Francisco
• The game uses the player’s GPS
coordinates to move the character around
the virtual map
Thursday, May 16, 13

7. Fear of Fog
Thursday, May 16, 13

8. Technical Details - Geo
• Inside the game, there’s a1024x1024 grid of
location tiles
• Geo data, as it arrives from the iPhone, is
translated into this 1024x1024 grid
• Allows the engine to be potentially
independent of geolocation
Thursday, May 16, 13

9. Storytelling
• Urban Legends
• Fantastical Histories of San Francisco
• No killing, no competition
• All about exploration and conversation
Thursday, May 16, 13

10. Fear of Fog
Conversation
Thursday, May 16, 13

11. More Real-World Data
• Visualizes the fog on the in-game map
• Realtime weather data from
wunderground.com
• Updated every 15 minutes, surprisingly
accurate
Thursday, May 16, 13

12. Fear of Fog
Fog layer visualized
Thursday, May 16, 13

13. Technical Details - Fog
• wunderground.com
• Crowd-sourced weather data
• Provides temp, humidity, wind directions, not fog
• Fog caching layer on my own server
• Bay fog is hard to measure using weather instruments
• Instead, measuring likelihood of fog
• Generates a weather map in static JSON format
• Easy on the iOS side, scales well server side
Thursday, May 16, 13

14. Art: Ultima Sprite Map - detail
Thursday, May 16, 13

15. Art: Hand-Drawn Tiles
Thursday, May 16, 13

16. What I Mean When I
Say Experimental
• Not a game that many people will play
• Fewer people will finish it
• Remember Zelda quests?
• Back and forth and back and forth
• Imagine doing this on a bicycle in SF
• Making something unusual for a small
audience
Thursday, May 16, 13

17. Avoiding Commerce:
Tech & Art
• The Art World
• Alternative source of funding
• Rhizome.org - art & technology grants
• Awesome Foundation (@awesomesfo)
• Side-stepping the demands and
expectations of the market
Thursday, May 16, 13

18. Future Developments:
Calendaring
• Integration of San Francisco Calendar
• Bay to Breakers
• Tidal Charts
• Critical Mass
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19. Future Developments:
Beyond the Bay
• Proposed Sequel in Williamsburg/NewYork
• Applied for a grant from Rhizome.org
Thursday, May 16, 13

20. More Information
• http://www.fearoffog.com/
• alex@meatfreezer.com
• 206.255.1028
Thursday, May 16, 13