Orange Cone

An announcement of someone developing a GPS-enabled handheld game system. This is yet more of the conversion of "all electronic objects about the size of your hand" that I'm expecting will be in high gear soon--pretty much until phones, cameras, gps devices, remotes and anything else that looks like that become a single object. The question will then be what to call that object.

But back to the game. First of all, it really underscores the fact that kids don't have nearly the same rights that adults do. An object that let someone else track your whereabouts remotely would certainly be much more difficult to propose and accept if targeted toward adults. And the possible misuses of that information are really extreme. If I was a kid in a group of kids with these things, the first thing I'd do is swap 'em with my friends so that our parents wouldn't know whose kid they were tracking, and then swap those with friends from neighboring towns, etc. Second of all, it seems like they're missing the most interesting part of this: that geolocation can be a critical part of the game, not just as a surveillance device. Sheesh, if you're going to be building the hardware and communication infrastructure into this thing to do all of the tracking, why not make it an actual feature for the user of the system?