Adviews

‘Chromaroma is an online multiplayer game played out as you travel the city with your Oyster Card. By using Oyster data we are able to show you your Tube travel, and every journey means you amass points, taking a few steps further along the way to owning London.

Chromaroma is a type of location-based top-trumps. You collect places, identities, modes of transport and passengers as you travel around the city; discover and investigate mysteries attached to different locations and build alliances with fellow passengers that share your journeys. It’s a game you can play on your own, or part of a team.’

Chromaroma is pretty exciting. It clearly echoes platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla but the TFL data adds another level to it. If they can pull off making it genuinely interesting to use by actually telling you something you didn’t know or offering you a worthwhile reward or pay-off beyond the initial ‘this is cool so I’ll have a go’ stage then I think it could be a big success.

I am intrigued to see whether the appeal of gaming itself is enough to build a base of players for the long run or whether those putting in effort to sign up and regularly engage in the game will want to see some tangible form of reward. I suspect this might split the players between the casual and the hardcore enthusiasts, asking a wider question of whether for these type of location based platforms the fun of playing is sufficient reward. Inevitably this will probably depend on how enjoyable the game is and upon their being several levels of complexity and involvement.

Here‘s a presentation with many more details by Katy Lindemann, and she talks here about trying to involve more partners which will hopefully develop upon the reward side for the user.

[Annoyingly Slideshare embedding is still up the creek hence the millions of links]

Obviously it’s still early days but that is what is exciting about it, this project could go in any number of directions and I’m really looking forward to playing with it to see how it works out.

There is another presentation by the brain behind it here.

Yet another ‘youth craze’ that schools are getting worked up about. Read about it here.

Interestingly though some schools are using them as rewards. Along the lines of Droga5′s ‘Million Project‘ where kids are given a phone and get minutes and texts for showing up and working well, schools have been offering them as credit for good work or behaviour.

CNN Money Interview with the founder.