Uncle Roy All Around You: Mixing Games and Theatre on the City Streets

Uncle Roy All Around You is a research paper by Flintham, Anastasi, Benford and colleagues that describes a pervasive game mixing street performance with online play in central London during May and June 2003. Street players, using handheld computers and wireless networking, searched the city for an elusive character named Uncle Roy, while online players followed them through a parallel 3D model of the city, tracking their progress and able to help or hinder them through text, audio and chat. The work examines how preprogrammed game content and live theatre can be combined to produce a compelling experience, with trust in strangers as a central theme.

The paper reports that the single staging involved 272 street players and over 200 online players, with street players capped at ten simultaneous participants due to technical and human resource constraints. Feedback from questionnaires, emails and a favourable review in London's Metro newspaper indicated that street players found the experience disconcerting and absorbing. Online player reactions were more mixed, with some engaging effectively while others were confused about their roles or used their position to tease or misdirect street players.

The authors identify four mechanisms through which theatre and game were blended: formal initial briefings, the use of passersby as unwitting actors, encouragement to step outside normal behavioural boundaries, and behind-the-scenes orchestration by a control room team. They propose a three-layer model of preprogrammed content, live performance and orchestration. The principal limitation identified is scalability: the production required more than ten actors and crew for twenty players at a time, and the authors frame scaling to much larger audiences as the key challenge for future work.