Kickstarter project Turf Geography Club launches its “Foursquare + Monopoly” app

However, I wonder about its longevity. I remember back when Gowalla was the big new thing and I had friends literally walking halfway across London just to collect all the cool badges. After a few months they got bored and stopped playing, probably because they realised that walking across cities for badges just wasn't worth the payoff.

Turf is a little different because you get rewards by going to the same places. In fact, the more you frequent the same place, the more you can build it up and defend it and get neat stuff. But in my case - and in the case of many people I know - I don't actually travel to that many different locations, usually going to the same few shops and cafes. I check into these on Foursquare and I'm Mayor of the same few places, and I have been for a couple of years. It may sound boring, but I suspect that most people are boring.

So I would probably just end up owning the same places I'm Mayor of on Foursquare, building them up a few levels, increasing their defences, successfully fending off the occasional attackers, unless they were so bothered to keep on checking in more than me, which would require some dedication. If they did that, I don't know if I'd be bothered to check in enough to defend my bases myself.

So maybe Turf is just not for me, it's for people who enjoy exploring new places. I imagine they'll play it a hell of a lot, because it really does look cool. But will they keep on playing it? Maybe. I'm not sure it has the depth.

On a side note, I think that a lot of these check-in style 'true' location-based apps run into the same problem, in that most people really don't go to that many different places, and that having to manually check in every time requires a certain type of obsessive personality; and that automatic check-in freaks people out.

(I also remember hearing about some next-gen persistent transmedia game that you'd play as an FPS on a PC or a console, and then if you were injured in the game, then you could literally walk to a pharmacy to get healed. It sounds cool but it's idiotic. Most people get impatient waiting a few seconds for their TV to turn on, and we think they'll walk to the pharmacy? I don't think so.)

Location based gaming throws up a lot of challenges and problems that we felt were less than ideal as a gaming experience and instead of just launching something, we over analysed and try to solve them all upfront (without evidence that they are really problems). My only advice is just launch!

Disclosure: I'm friends with one of the guys who made it.

(My one little bit of criticism is that I find the 8-bit-style text really hard to read on the iPhone's screen.)