Students from NYU, Parsons and Pratt were given Nokia N80 phones and instructed to download the Manhattan Story Mashup python application. At 11:30 we gathered at Columbus Circle and at noon the game began. It was actually pretty simple to follow. Players were sent keywords from stories created online by users not playing the game in the streets. Players were expected to use the app to take photos of the keywords 'creatively' and the photos were automatically sent to the mashup server (a really nice feature of python...no constant permissions issues like J2ME where you have to say yes a thousand times just to let your app access anything). Players were also sent photos that other players had taken along with options of what the picture was of. Both the player who took the picture and the player who guessed what the picture was of received points. Throughout the game a player could see what 'place' they were in and what their score was. I unfortuntely never got higher then 62nd and ended in 80th place. (although I maintain that it is not so bad since there were 160 players)

The game was actally a lot of fun. I did everything from laying on the ground with Nanna because Oren got the word morgue, to flashing a very small piece of my underwear for the word lingerie. Our group was also particularily lucky (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) because we were followed around by a Finnish Television cameraman. (kind of funny since Nanna is Finnish) I'm sure he has enough embarrasing footage of all of us, thank god I don't live in Finland. The only thing that a put a damper on the game was that the app was surprising slow, especially when uploading photos. The app also completely crashed for about fifteen minutes halfway through the game (I maintain that is why I lost..haha) It also worked differently on different peoples phones, apparently some people could barely get it to work at all. Over all, though, it was a good time. I just wish that they had saved all of the photos every player took on the website. Forget the 'stories' they were trying to create, it would have been funny to see all the crazy shit we did/took photos of. Definitely a good time, I would do it again. They just need to do a little bit of work on the app.