Cities aren’t necessarily brilliant for your health – mental or physical. It’s easier to access great medical care in a city, of course, but it’s also easier to live a mostly-indoors lifestyle, to spend your days going between one tiny box and another: bedroom, train, office; office, bus, bedroom.
So when, in 2012, I began working with games company Six to Start on a project for the Department of Health, we focused on ways to encourage movement, with the walking patterns of urban life in mind. The National Health Service recommends we each take at least 10,000 steps a day – the equivalent of walking between four and five miles – but most of us aren’t doing nearly that much.
We asked ourselves how we could make it more fun to get off the tube a stop earlier, to walk rather than take the bus, to get out for a 20-minute stroll at lunchtime. The smartphone app we came up with – The Walk – is designed to fit around the kind of walking people do in an urban setting. Not a three-hour yomp through the countryside, but small bursts throughout the day.
The result, launched in December 2013, is an audio adventure game where the only way to advance is to keep moving. It’s written as a pacy thriller – the story is a cross between The 39 Steps and North by Northwest.
In the first episode, in a case of mistaken identity, you get given a package in Inverness station – but just as you’re about to get on the train for London, terrorists blow up the building and set off an electromagnetic pulse, effectively stopping you from using motorised transport. Now the terrorists are after you because they want the package you’re carrying; the police are after you because they think you blew up the station; and the only way to clear your name and find out what’s going on is to take the very long walk from Inverness to London.
The story is full of cliffhangers – enough, we hope, to keep players coming back day after day, to keep walking to find out what happens next. We thought a lot about how to hook into the “just one more level” motivation of a good video game and use that to encourage walking. That’s why each map shows you how much walking you need to do to get to the next clip of audio drama – and why extra walking will earn you additional story pieces. You might not feel that you can do 100 minutes of walking today, but just another seven minutes to pick up that vital clue … you can do it!
Most European cities are very walkable compared to their American counterparts – yet we are increasingly relying on cars and public transport to get ourselves around. Our idea was to use the fun of gaming to give users a little nudge in the direction of exploring on foot. Once you’re in that habit, it’ll stay with you.
The 2014 AppMyCity! judging panel is made up of 10 leading experts from the private, non-profit, cultural and media fields:
Naomi Alderman, novelist, broadcaster and games designer
Arun Bhikshesvaran, chief marketing officer of Ericsson
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings
John Egan, CEO of Sandbox
Di-Ann Eisnor, vice president of platform and partnership at Waze
Hussein Kanji, a partner at Hoxton Ventures
Jemima Kiss, head of technology at the Guardian
Anil Menon, Cisco's president of globalisation and smart+connected communities
Christian Noske, a senior associate with BMW i Ventures
John Rossant, founder and chairman of the New Cities Foundation
The deadline for AppMyCity! entries is 18 April. The judging panel will assess the 10 shortlisted semi-finalists and select three finalists, who will be announced on 21 May. Click here for details of how to enter.
The world's best new city mobile apps
