Poop-Themed Location-Based Game

From Milan (and via We-Make-Money-Not-Art), comes a bizarre, but arguably worthwhile big game concept: to make the process of play not only enjoyable, but productive as well. Welcome to Dark Treasure (Tesoro Scuro), the gaming adjunct of a slick little Italian pooper-scooping service known as Pooptopia.

Pooptopia relies on a community of users to identify instances of dog poo in the city of Milan. Once identified, Pooptopia sends out an individual on a moped to scoop the “dog litter,” and dispose of it properly. The system is apparently funded by the city itself, meaning the official scooter scoopers are paid for their work, which is comforting to know.

The gaming portion of this is simplistic: A user aligns him/herself with one of three teams. If a user sees dog poo in Milan, they take a picture of it, and send it to the Pooptopia e-mail address, earning points for their team. Bonus points are promised if the user can identify the area in which the poop was seen (which seems like an important detail to me). A prize is offered to the top “poo-hunter” each week, which makes the team mechanic unnecessary, considering the individual is ultimately credited and rewarded, and not the conglomerate.

While earnest in terms of its concept, Dark Treasure fails to seem enjoyable in the overall, in part because the goals of the entire project seem a little jumbled. Consider that the game is being used as an incentive for members of the community to locate and report instances of “doggy doo;” the creators expect players to want to play a game that is fun, and in playing that game, they will indirectly assist the “Pooptopia” system. The play itself, however, is not really expected to be that rewarding, as evidenced by the fact that the official Pooptopia site pronounces the goal of the game to be the sanitization of Milan, rather than simply the pleasure of playing. So, basically, the game is intended to be an incentive to clean up the city, even though cleaning up the city is intended to be the incentive to play the game. (Huh?)

Still, the notion of productivity through gameplay is interesting and always worth pursuing, and Dark Treasure stands as a unique intersection of the “Serious Games” ideology and “Big Games” execution.