About Blowtooth

Blowtooth has been developed to explore the limits of pervasive gaming in public spaces where the constant surveillance of law-abiding and innocuous behaviour has become the everyday norm.

The game is specifically designed to exploit the affordances of a particular class of public space - namely international airports - in which people are subject to particularly high levels of intrusive surveillance and security monitoring. Even in everyday experience (i.e. outside of a game) such surveillance can be both simultaneously thrilling and frightening; the possibility of harnessing these sensations in a game - or indeed any other art form - has great potential.

Blowtooth being played in Heathrow Terminal 5

Blowtooth is further designed with a fictional narrative theme that is deliberately provocative given the environment in which it is set i.e. the game-play involves the covert smuggling of drugs through airport security checks. In reality, of course, no drugs are involved and the game simply polls a player's vicinity for Bluetooth devices, produces a list of these devices and allows the player to conceptually dump or retrieve contraband on or off one or more devices in the list. No interaction with the other devices - or their owners - is made other than to discover the anonymous and factory allocated hardware addresses. Usage of Bluetooth in this way is common - even in airports.

Blowtooth was born out of a sense of frustration and exasperation that the average traveller feels when subjected to a typical airport experience. We wish, in our own way as games designers and ubiquitous computing researchers, to draw attention to the often needless, inconsistent and discourteous levels of scrutiny that law abiding travellers are put through merely to board an aeroplane to get to our holiday or business destination.

We also have a sense of disappointment with the public uptake, so far, of pervasive gaming and are motivated to create new examples of pervasive games that better exploit places, spaces, societal attitudes, behavioural norms and, above all simple, available, and usable technology.