 Hi, we're here today at Konversator in Berlin with Michael Gräubig to play Secret City, which is a location-based game with augmented reality. During the last chapters, we have looked at several formats and media technologies which we can use to tell fictional stories. All of them, however, present fictional worlds that are physically detached from the viewers, readers, gamers or users' real everyday world and spatial surroundings. Basically, no matter whether you lean back or forward, you stay in one place while consuming or interacting with the media. In this chapter, I want to give you an insight into another kind of media format that actually doesn't even work without our real world, and us as physically moving bodies, playing a major part in it. And that's location-based storytelling. Location-based storytelling and location-based games, short LBG, are media formats that are closely tied to a real-world location, often times using GPS data and maps to guide through the experience while interacting with the experiencer and the experiencer's position. For most location-based experiences, users are required to have technical devices, such as GPS-ready smartphones or tablets. Location-based media formats nearly always require an active gamer or experiencer with a strong lean forward approach. They can require lots of physical movement, for example walking, running or hiding, and make the experiencer an active part of the story or game. Today joining us is Michael Erstreubig from Erlangen, southern Germany, who will tell us about his work as a location-based game designer and what it's all about. Also, we will share a close look at one of his latest location-based games, Secret City, analyzing the mechanics and digging a little bit deeper into what's important concerning creating such projects technologically and content-wise. Hello, my name is Michael Erstreubig. I design games and playful experiences and I'm the game designer of Secret City. The introduction is that you are coming into the city to meet an old friend and then the story gets you into a conspiracy where you meet different people and during the game, which is a location-based game, you are like walking through Kreuzberg in Berlin or you can also play in Hamburg and uncover some kind of dark secret, which I won't tell you right now. We now have the starting screen, which kind of like tells us the beginning of a story, right? Yes. Basically, the game starts here at the composite tour, so you have to be here in order to start it. And then you get this story introduction, which tells you that you got a message from a friend and now we get an intro video, which kind of tells the story again. The video ends with the main character, played by us, packing his backpack and leaving the hotel room to visit Max in the Reichenberger Straße. Is this video already related to the place? No, this video is kind of like gets you into the story, so it's kind of an introduction of some of the main characters at the beginning. You go on a journey yourself to solve this mystery of where is Max. Exactly. How many chapters are there for one episode? Because maybe you can explain the rhythm, like how is it explained, how is it told the story? So overall the game has three seasons and we realized the first season of the game. The first season has three episodes and each episode has like two or three chapters. So we are arriving at like around ten chapters in the first season. Is it comparable to acts like in a TV series or is it different from acts, these chapters? I didn't structure them according to acts, but I kind of structured them along places. I was looking at the part of the city where the game would play and I was looking at some parts which gave a natural structure to the game and this location structure resulted in the chapters basically. And also then in the storytelling structure? Yes. Yeah. So the story is around two things, it's around places and it's around the protagonists and the characters in the game. You solve puzzles, you try to get behind a conspiracy, you collect items, you talk to characters a lot and so we took the principle of an adventure game. Like Monty Island? Like Monty Island. Like Day of the Tentacle? Yeah, like Edna and these great adventure games and adapted them to the city as a playing field instead of the computer as a playing field. Now you get the information by Max, that's your friend, that he's living near a composite tour, he gives you a passport. So what we see is like a compass and a map of Berlin. The map of our surrounding and then we see that here's a spot in the Reichenberger Straße, just at the beginning of the Reichenberger Straße and now we walk down the street and see what's this is Max's flat where we where we meet him. OK, so let's meet Max. Let's meet Max, yeah. The in-game story and given map lead us down Reichenberger Straße to a place marked on this map as Max's flat. As we stop and use the camera off our tablet to look around us through the screen, we can see an animated police car and a character that have been waiting for us here. That's one of the things I like. OK, you see the police car standing here and augmented reality. Technically, that means an augmented reality layer, a virtual one, is programmed to show up as an additional layer on our camera image on the tablet. Once we enter a close proximity to the program GPS data that is tied to this certain plot point in the story or the game. This means a part of the software is programmed to start only when we hit a certain longitude and latitude value. That is absolutely unique worldwide. These values can, for example, be easily determined on the web if you click on a certain location. So we have location based games, which means that you put the position of the player as an input to the game and we have augmented reality, which adds some virtual objects to the perception of the environment. If you can combine these two principles, we can generate compelling experiences where you experience your surrounding in completely new ways. We can use augmented reality to add things to our physical surrounding, but we can also, for example, use augmented reality to hide things and to cover things up. So for example, there's a project by Julian Oliver, he's an artist, and he uses augmented reality to hide ads in the surrounding and replaces them by art. It's called the advertiser. So you are looking at these buildings and you don't see the ads anymore that are projected on the buildings, but you see art on these buildings.