Inside Social Games

While traveling can often be a bit of a headache, here’s a new iPhone app that might take a little bit of the edge off. The game is called Gowalla by Austin-based Alamofire (the developers of PackRat for Facebook) – makes great use of the iPhone’s location awareness, effectively mixing the virtual with reality.

First and foremost, Gowalla is a collecting game. The objective is to collect various badges (icons, stamps, and pins) from locations around the world. (Well, eventually it will be international, but not just yet. For now, it is live in San Francisco and Austin.) Whether you are in your own city or a new place altogether, if you log onto Gowalla, you can find a Google Map of wherever you are with pinpoints for each badge location.

As you have probably guessed, when you travel to the location, you acquire the item “there” for your virtual passport. Of course, the game is not limited to just individual locations. The developers have included two other features for a little extra collection.

Alamofire has created an achievement system (dubbed “Trips” in this case) in Gowalla as well. These are fun special badges that can be earned by visiting all the places on a particular list (i.e. bar hopping in Austin). Heck, the makers even include special events from time to time to allow for those in attendance to earn special rewards too.

Beyond Trips, however, comes the most interesting feature: Users can add their own locations. If there are lots of players in an area, they could then find your badges. It could be a really fun way to create scavenger hunts for your friends, and Gowalla becomes much more interesting when thinking about it as a way to organize mobs.

Currently, Gowalla is only available on the iPhone, but the developers have said they have plans to support other GPS-enabled phones including Blackberries and Android phones in the future. We’ll let you know when they’re released!