Pickpocket In Your Pocket

"Please, Sir, I want some more... interesting and interactive video games that might help me meet people rather than curl up into a ball of fat and self pity on my couch."

-Oliver Twist (kinda)

Most games are more fun to play with other people. Computers have become pretty good at playing with us, but are not as much fun to tease and cajole with before and after. It's this comradery and social interaction that makes playing games with others more fun, even if you don't quite know your opponent, through game play, you get to know them.

“Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.”

-Eric Berne (some Canadian guy)

Recently I have been playing a lot of Tetris on my phone (high score on Ultra - 20,092). It keeps me from calling and texting people obsessively when I am alone and lonely. If only I could play Tetris while drunk, if only.

Tons of people play video games on their phones now. In fact, almost everyone with a cell phone has a game on it that they play. The sad thing is, most people play these games when they are alone in a crowd, when they are sitting in a waiting room or on a bus, train, plane, or boat surrounded by dozens of other people.

What if there was a video game that helped people interact?

Here is the idea: A pickpocket video game that would detect other players in a certain radius of the player, via bluetooth. Players would collect money and items that other players would try to steal out from under their noses.

I could spend all day telling you various ideas for rules such as 'puzzle protectors' and 'guard dogs' to make it more exciting etc. but that would take ALL DAY. However, one aspect of the game that might make it more interesting, and would make it more profitable for the video game distributor would be the fact that people would actually pay minuscule amounts of money like five to ten cents for the items in their virtual purse or wallet.

This doesn't seem like much money? If Apple had loaded a game like this onto every iPhone for free from the beginning, there would be around 45 million people out there playing this game. If each one of those people decided to buy a virtual iPhone to put in their virtual pocket for 10cents each... Yeah, $4.5 million.

This kind of game could be designed to work on almost any phone on the market, and almost every phone on the market now has bluetooth built in for headset communication. Of course this kind of idea could easily be adapted to an existing game such as World of Warcraft, as some sort of add on.

P.S. Subscribe to Ideas By Chuck. You will regret it, but like sex with an anonymous stranger.

P.P.S. I still haven't gotten a call from U2. So hurt.

P.P.P.S. Sure it won't be as fun as iBoobs, but what could be?

P.P.P.P.S. Twitter is still being misused by millions, but if there is anyone you should follow on Twitter, it's me, ideasbychuck.