Aug 13, 2013

1 Up Fever - Bitcoin Collecting As A Game



I can definitely see this concept taking off in our future sometime soon, it's only going to be a matter of 'who.' This faux documentary follows the interesting concept of a city of people in the full throes of addiction to a truly fun looking game called 1 Up Fever, in which protagonists hunt Super Mario Bros. style coin around the city with a minimal Bitcoin value attached. It's a truly interesting concept, as the collective processing power of all these phones could be used to mine coins for a larger entity while the user acts like a worker, akin to Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' crowdsourcing initiative for getting their tedious work done for pennies up to dollars a task.

In the Berlin city everyone is going crazy for a viral new app. Anyone with a smartphone can play a sort of Super Mario Bros arcade game in Augmented Reality. In the game a coin corresponds to 0.01 Bitcoins. Citizens’ habits are tainted by the game. Coins are hidden all over the city, you can spot them just scanning around with your device, not always they are easy to grab. People started to leave their jobs in order to collect Coins in the streets. 

All over the city people are jumping and running around with their smartphones, trying to grab as many virtual coins as they can… The shooting itself is been a game in the game: all the interviewees were asked to imagine the city as the app release happened for real and to answer thereby, sometimes they were even asked to play with it. Part of the work was dedicated to the Bitcoinkiez, a small Berlin district where local owners started to sell their products in Bitcoins through the Bitcoin Wallet App, which would be the 'real'  app to whom the Super Mario app is corresponding.

No comments:

Post a Comment