Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

Gowalla’s been evolv­ing these past few weeks. First there was the intro­duc­tion of the Incase chal­lenge with sev­eral real items (such as sleeves, bags and other acces­sories) that could be won at Apple Stores when you received the vir­tual icons and tweeted about your checkin, then the User-created Trips — a much requested fea­ture — were intro­duced ten­ta­tively in a some­what sand­boxed mode and finally at the begin­ing of this week Gowalla for iPhone 1.4 hit the App Store with sev­eral game enhance­ments and user inter­face improve­ments. I’d like to linger on the lat­ter first.

Gowalla for iPhone 1.4

This release was dubbed minor by the Gowalla team but there were some very inter­est­ing — if sub­tle — mod­i­fi­ca­tions included. First there was an obvi­ous nod to the beau­ti­ful “slide and release” refresh sys­tem Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 2 uses. Pre­vi­ously you had to go back up one level and back to refresh a list of spots for instance, which was really inef­fi­cient. Now if you slide down­ward when at the top of the Spot list, the inter­face will fol­low your fin­ger and a the Gowalla kan­ga­roo will pop out to sig­nal a refresh. If you slide back down, noth­ing hap­pens. If you instead release upon seing the kan­ga­roo, a refresh is launched to dis­play a more up-to-date list. Any­one who whined about the iPad being just a big­ger iPod Touch (is that sup­posed to be a bad thing?) this week won’t notice or care, the rest of us will see it as the cru­cial expe­ri­ence improve­ment that it is.

Drive-By Gowalling

In an upcom­ing post I will dis­cuss more in-depth the two major game dynam­ics one can decide to adopt towards Gowalla, but in this 1.4 update a clear step was taken to limit the excesses of one of them.

The Scav­enger Hunt­ing aspect of Gowalla is a very sat­is­fy­ing but unsus­tain­able way to play the game. It basi­cally implies you will try to checkin (and maybe found) as many spots as you can not because you actu­ally went — and stayed — some­where, but because you want to accu­mu­late items in the hopes of find­ing spots with rare item. You can either receive rare items at cer­tain spots (upon checkin) or swap an exit­ing item in your pack with a rare item that was pre­vi­ously dropped (by a founder) or swapped by a visitor.

Pre­vi­ously, this way of play­ing was made eas­ier by the fact that as soon as you checked in some­where you would be prompted to drop an item to become a founder and would be able to see directly what items were cur­rently at this location.

1.4 changed that and now you are taken to the Spot Details tab instead of the Spot Items tab. And to see a spot’s items and even­tu­ally drop an item to become a founder, you now have to take an addi­tional step by tap­ping the Items tab.

This may seem very sub­tle, but it sud­denly makes it a lit­tle more tedious, time and attention-consuming to swap items and found a spot. Which might be good news for the peo­ple who wor­ried about hordes of Gowalling dri­vers out there becom­ing a worse scourge than ser­ial texters.

Chal­lenges, Trips and Friends

The Trips inter­face was also refined slightly prior to 1.4 with the addi­tion of My Trips and Friend Trips. Cur­rently the only user-created trips you can see are those of your friends (as in peo­ple you added on Gowalla) and your own. Team Gowalla explained that depend­ing on the pop­u­lar­ity of these trips they will selec­tively (good) fea­ture some of them as actual trips with cus­tom Gowalla-made icons. A very nice com­mu­nity touch if you ask me and again a good way to use crowd-sourcing with an edi­to­r­ial touch.

There is another new cat­e­gory (I believe) in the Trips page, it’s called Chal­lenges and used to be bun­dled with real trips.

Chal­lenges are dif­fer­ent than trip and cor­re­spond more to the Scav­enger Hunt side of the game. You can unlock these with quantity-based achieve­ments rather than check­ing in a spe­cific spots. For instance you become a Way­farer as soon as you checkin at 250 dif­fer­ent spots. I listed these in a pre­vi­ous post. There are more exotic chal­lenges (like Code Mon­key and Get Out With Incase) but gen­er­ally it’s an under­de­vel­oped fea­ture of Gowalla that could wel­come some more orig­i­nal ideas.

TAGS

• gowalla
• iphone
• scavenger hunt
• tweetie 2

Posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:47 pm. Filed under Neurons. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.