Links or Info on Citywide, Real-Life Games (a la Streetwars)?

August 21, 2004 11:34 PM

I recently heard about a cool city-wide, real-life game starting to take place in my hometown, Vancouver BC called StreetWars: Killer. It's also set to take place in New York City. In the past I've heard rumours of a "PokeManhattan" and seem to recall BoingBoing posting about a city-wide Monopoly or Chess game, though can't find them. Does anyone have links on any city-wide, real life games like these?

Oh, the NYC game comments make it seem pretty cool.

Sorry about the double post, this is my first link to AskMetafilter & I was trying to get the HTML right & hit "post" too early. Hopefully the admin (Matt?) can delete one of them? :-)

posted by F4B2 to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

There's PacManhattan, if that's the sort of thing you mean.
posted by Zonker at 4:26 AM on August 22, 2004

OK, this is just a less-imaginative but better-organized version of Killer, which we used to play around NYC in high school in the '80s. And we almost got arrested then since skulking around the city with a toy gun in your pocket, casing people's office buildings, was already a bad idea.
posted by nicwolff at 6:25 AM on August 22, 2004

Yes, in post 911 NYC this seems like a cry of "please detain me for questioning!"

Not that it wouldn't be fun.
posted by grumblebee at 7:12 AM on August 22, 2004 [1 favorite]

Nothing to add to your question, but, ahh, the memories...

I ran a Killer game in high school for two summers before everyone had jobs and/or moved away. It was so much fun, and I got the police called on me three times.. once for a bomb scare! I would not even think of playing this game in the age of Homeland Security though.
posted by Hildago at 10:08 AM on August 22, 2004

I played Killer in high school, too, but even that was old news. When my father found out what we were doing, he told me that he used to play something like it with his buddies in college, based on the film The Tenth Victim. Nothing new, etc, etc. I was actually fantasizing of organizing a city-wide game (almost identical to the way they're implementing it here) recently, but I'm not sure that Austin has the kind of population that could support it...
posted by majcher at 10:41 AM on August 22, 2004

No links, but we still play Killer in college. It's great to be walking to class and randomly see someone else who is playing and having to run for dear life as hoards of other students wonder WTF is going on. Ahhhh, good times.
posted by jmd82 at 2:40 PM on August 22, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks for the reminiscences about "Killer" and the point to "PacManhattan." So I've found from the "PacManhattan" site that this genre of game is called "Urban Games." I also found the BoingBoing story on the urban game in Minneapolis/St. Paul that I remembered.

Thanks for all the info, I may have a FPP out of this for Metafilter once I explore some more links. Cheers!
posted by F4B2 at 3:11 PM on August 22, 2004