041103 - From Guy Fawkes to the Nokia Game and on

Launched in 1999, Nokia Game was a true multi-media game where players competed on the web and on their phones to win the latest Nokia products. Around the world Nokia added its million players to its loyal band of supporters and customers. It was though, something far more than an advertising gimmick.
Take the 2001 game, where players had to navigate a network of virtual tunnels and time their exits with real-world times when they could get to a PC, in order to move on to the next tunnel. Clues came to players by text message, phone call, email, TV and press ads. Between tunnels, additional challenges ranged from strategy games to having to learn morse code in 48 hours.
The problem that Nokia faced, though, was that with many highly talented fans (hackers in the old-fashioned sense), they struggled to keep ahead of the players in their innovation. Take the tunnels; within hours players had pooled information and built a map of the tunnel system. Or the morse code challenge; some bright-spark realised that they could download a morse-code reader for their PC and it would just print out Nokia's coded messages. In 2002's entertainment stock market game players not only built stock tickers which would be the envy of the FTSE, but also worked out how to manipulate the market – just like real-world traders!
Nokia's response to this came in the 2003 game, where they pitted one player against the other – harder to hack than a computer opponent. The game also had more than a passing similarity to William Gibson's book, Pattern Recognition, with players hunting for clues buried deep in the pixels of images sent out by Flo, the game's protagonist.
However, the greatest thing about the Nokia Game was that it gave thousands of players around the world the chance to pit their wits, energy and creativity against the most innovative and imaginative challenges that Nokia could throw at them during an intense two week period. It was an innovation-fest as much as game.
But with the Nokia Game gone, where else can its players, or indeed anyone, look to for a challenge to demonstrate their flair for creative programming, build community spirit, and get a sense of what the Internet could really do when pushed to its imaginative limits?
Perhaps one outlet may show the way. In the virtual world of Second Life, they've just held a Burning Man event, echoing the festival held in Nevada desert each year. Combining design and imagination with creative coding in a 3D virtual environment, it was a superb celebration of leading edge Internet community – even if it lacked the frisson of Nokia's challenges. Just imagine, though, creating something like the Nokia Game in a virtual world like Second Life.
So perhaps this November 5th, as I look at our own burning man, my thoughts may be more of what challenges we can create to test the skills and innovation of 21st century Internet users, than of the challenges faced by a 17th century hacker.