“FoundIt!”: A street art scavenger hunt. “FoundIt!” is a game that turns street art all over the world into a fun and exciting scavenger hunt. In theory it could be designed for any smartphone with a camera and internet connectivity, but for the purpose of this exercise it will be imagined as an iPhone app.
The game starts when the user finds an interesting mural, stencil, or sticker and takes a picture of it. Immediately, image-recognition software checks the photo against the app’s database of known street art. If a match is found, it returns information about the piece: its creator (if known), its earliest sighting, and its location. It will also return a map with locations of similar pieces nearby, giving hints (but not outright explanations) of where to find them.
If the art is not recognized by the database, the user can submit it along with a brief description of the location to the savestreetart.org website, where it will be reviewed by an administrator. (Repeated abuse of this system, i.e. submitting irrelevant photos, will naturally result in user bans.) If possible, a volunteer administrator living in the region will do an on-site check and take an “official”, high-res photo to store in the database. If the work is deemed valid, it will be permanently added to the collection and becomes a part of the game. As a reward, the player will be credited in its description for finding it.
Photos are saved to a scrapbook so player can keep a collection of his discoveries. His ranking as an explorer will go up the more pieces he finds. Special “achievements” can be unlocked as well, for example, by finding a target number of pieces in a particular city, finding rare or hidden pieces, or finding sets of work by specific artists.
Perhaps the most important function of this game, “FoundIt!” creates an extensive archive of graffiti browsable through the savestreetart.org website. There, all recorded pieces are available to the public and can be filtered by city, artist, date, and so on. Works can also be tagged as “extinct” if they have been painted over or removed. The website also serves as a nexus for people playing the game. It features weekly challenges, player leader boards, and forums where players can get help finding difficult pieces. Given the ephemeral nature of street art, savestreetart.org performs an important service, recording these images before they are erased forever. It preserves the efforts of street artists worldwide and makes public work even more public. In conjunction with the “FoundIt!” game, it increases awareness of street art among enthusiasts and encourages them to confront the art in its original setting. How does “FoundIt!” Meet Janet Murray’s characteristics of interactivity? Clearly, it is encyclopedic. It creates a living, growing database of street art worldwide. It also records useful information about each piece, such as where to find it and its approximate creation date. It is also participatory. The more it is played, the bigger and more rewarding the game gets. When one player finds a new piece of street art, all the others are rewarded with its location on a map. Players are spurred by friendly competition to find more pieces that their neighbor, and the game responds to this by raising their rank in the game the more art they find. It is procedural as well. In particular, it relies on accurate image recognition technology. While humans are naturally much more adept at this than computers, they lack the capacity to compare thousands of images in a few seconds. This is where computers’ processing speed becomes a necessity. After running the player’s image through its algorithm, it is able to return relevant info about the piece and rewards the player for finding it.