Manhattan Story Mashup is an urban game, taking place on September 23rd 2006 in Manhattan, New York City. During the event, approximately 250 players will move around Manhattan, taking photos which match a given target. Targets are words from stories, written by you and other visitors on this web site collaboratively while the game goes on. The resulting illustrated stories are shown on large public signs in Times Square in real-time and on this web site.

We will open a storytelling tool on this web site a few days before the game event. Once the tool is open, follow the next easy steps:

Choose a story theme you like.

Form a skeleton for your story using sentences written by others.

Modify sentences as you like until you are satisfied with the story and click publish.

After these steps the game engine will pick up nouns from your newly created sentences. Each noun will be dispatched in real-time to a random player in Manhattan who uses a camera phone for illustration. However the player doesn't have to accept the word if she feels it is too difficult. To make sure that the taken photos actually correspond to your words, other players in Manhattan have to guess what the photo depicts.

Once a sentence has been illustriated succesfully through the above steps, it becomes available for other web storytellers to use within the storytelling tool. Thus the resulting stories are mashups of sentences contributed by various people and fresh images taken in downtown Manhattan!

These mashups get their world premiere on the Reuters Sign in Times Square, immediately after they are finished. Do not miss this unique opportunity to show your creativity in one of the most visible locations in the world!

In case you can't come to Times Square, you can see the stories live on your J2ME-enabled mobile phone using Widsets:

1. Create your own WidSets account at www.widsets.com
2. Add the Manhattan Story Mashup to your own personal WidSet from the library

Manhattan Story Mashup is organized by SensorPlanet, a Nokia Research Center -initiated research program on large-scale sensor networks. We are interested in combining the physical and the virtual worlds through new ways of sensing. As it happens, lots of people always carry a mobile phone with them, making it a perfect platform for this job. This game is a cool way to test our tools and theories in practice with a large number of people. Naturally we're also interested in sharing fun with other people in the Come Out and Play Festival, which gathers together many games like this in September.

This game was made possible by the following great open-source technologies by Nokia Research Center: Python for S60 and Web Browser for S60. If you are interested in developing games like this on S60 platform, take a look at Forum Nokia's Game Developer Resources as well.

If you want to find out more about the background and implementation of Manhattan Story Mashup, see the Behind the Scenes page by the game designers, Ville Tuulos and Jürgen Scheible. Our press contact is communication.corp@nokia.com.