The city is your playground
With the pandemic causing the entire world to go into lockdown, we realised more than ever our human need to get outside. And with lockdowns easing in countries around the world, many of us were eager to rediscover our own city, in a safe way.
With my team, we’ve spent the past year developing a free mobile app (iOS only for now) to help with that. Strollhunt is a real world game designed for you to discover beautiful and interesting places in the city through play. Strollhunt turns your leisurely stroll into an exciting adventure; you can think about it as Pokémon Go for people who want to learn about their city.
We’ve purposefully designed Strollhunt to make you more present in the real world. In practice, this means that the screen is not constantly screaming for your attention and is only here to send you off on an adventure, and there again for you to interact with your physical discovery. That’s because we want you to be immersed in the real world and believe that the real world shouldn’t be used as an excuse to lock you in a digital world. What’s the point of being outside if it is to be constantly looking at your phone?
We’ve also designed Strollhunt to not show Points of Interest (POIs) on a map because we feel that doing so leads the user to explore the city by mindlessly going from POI to POI. We believe exploring cities is not about the destination, the POI itself, but that it’s about the journey, everything you experience in between as you’re strolling the city on the hunt for the POI. In practice this means that Strollhunt makes it the whole point of the game for the player to discover wherever and whatever it is that the creator wants the player to discover through a combination of game mechanics. Instead of telling the user where to go in the city, showing her a photo of the POI and telling her facts about the POI, we want the user to see the POI with her eyes for (maybe) the first time, to have the delight of having uncovered the POI, and only then, tell her a story about why the creator brought her here, what’s culturally, historically or artistically significant about this POI.
But show don’t tell so watch here our trailer: https://youtu.be/HXh3WqTYSBo
Here’s our how Strollhunt works:
Strollhunt is free and available to play in San Francisco, New York City, London, Paris, Berlin and Barcelona, with more cities coming soon as our users start creating real world games in the cities they know and love.
Strollhunt is not just an app to find real world games to play in your city, it’s a platform enabling anyone to share their love for their city by creating games for everyone to play. Create your own game by applying Strollhunt’s game mechanics (the Magic Camera, Magic Radar and Q&A) to the places or things you want the world to discover. A cool piece of street art at the corner of your street? A confidential speciality that can only be found in one bar restaurant in the city? Strollhunt is an open canvas for you to express your creativity. We can only show you the minimum version of our Creator tools for now, but we’re hard at work developing the no code tools to make it extremely easy for everyone to create their own real world game right from within the app.
Strollhunt’s ambition is to be for the real world what Roblox is for the digital world.
For now, if you live in a city where no game is available on Strollhunt to play, you can tap the ‘CREATE’ button to add new places and things to discover and we will publish them in the app within 24 hours. So don’t wait, add your city to Strollhunt today.
I hope you will give Strollhunt a spin. Here is the link to download the app on the App Store in case you’re seduced by the concept:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strollhunt-walk-play-learn/id1525189730
Do let me know in the comments in case you have any questions or want to discuss what we do.
And remember to walk, play, learn.