The guys behind game developer Area Code are into magic.

Not the cause-things-to-fly-Harry-Potter magic, or the World-of-Warcraft-buff sort of magic, they're into the magic of possibilities. The possibilities of what can happen when the real world can have a direct impact on a game and vice-versa, the magic turns the world into a giant game.

The team showed off a little of that magic recently at the Where 2.0 conference where they announced that they would be bringing pirate-themed game Plundr to the DS, hopefully within the next year. In the game you sail from island to island a ship, buying, selling and fighting for goods. But to sail around the uncharted seas you'll need to get up, get outside and travel. The game will use a special form of positioning software that will rely on the Wi-Fi built into the DS.

"We built a prototype for the DS, it's homebrew at the moment, we are beginning talks with publishers about how to bring the game to the market and develop other location based games for the DS. We are also interested in the PSP," said Area Code co-founder Frank Lantz. "The response we've received about this online has been absolutely phenomenal."

But to make their game work, to turn code and technology into magic, the company needs to solve a lot of pretty tricky problems.

"Games that have real world presence use real world data, this is kind of our expertise," Lantz said.

"And when we are talking about tricky problems to solve, they're not just technical," added Kevin Slavin, creative director of the company. "They are primarily about game design and how that changes.

"What happens when games start to take elements of the rest of the world into account. One of the things we've learned, one of the difficult problems to solve for is how do you get hundreds or thousands of people to do the same thing at the same time. With Plundr it's thinking about the play from the ground up."

In Plundr, the game uses a "shared persistence" approach, Lantz said.

"Each of these islands in the game have a real world location. Based on your location in the world you are either discovering a new island or islands that have been found by another player."

The idea is that people will come to establish their own trade groups, so they're not, as it were, just ships passing in the night. The routes between the locations in the real world often traveled to, like the office and the home, will become trade routes.

"Our goal with this stuff is that we are really interested in emerging game play, but ultimately we want to be focused on great gameplay," Lantz said.

That means trying to make the game make use of your real world location without that game mechanic becoming a stumbling block to a gamer having fun.

"We spent a lot of time wrestling with these issues," Lantz said. "Ways to make your location relevant in the real world but without making it a constraint."

There are tons of games that have tried to do what Plundr hopes to do, out there, but they are, for the most part, experiments or ideas, or games that didn't solve that problem of constraining a gamer so much that it dampens the fun.

Even the game with the most mainstream success, Boktai, which relied on a solar sensor and built in clock for gameplay, ended up minimizing the importance of the solar sensor with each new game in the franchise until it got rid of it all together.

"It was a constraint on people's ability to play it," Lantz said. "We want to make your location enhance your experience of the game without making it a requirement."

So the developers have been experimenting with some of the fundamental designs of their game's world, chief among them the resolution of the islands you discover. Currently an island is about the size of six city block in New York City, far larger than how they started.

The team is hoping to fill the islands with lots of fun things to do, so it won't be as necessary to physically move around to enjoy the game, and to make it possible for nearby islands to communicate with one another without traveling.

Other ideas include giving players different types of ships based on what sort of system they are playing on. Perhaps, one day, an armada of PSP ships will face off against a navy of DS ships with PC ships watching on.

A form of the game is currently running on the PC, it is, they say a prototype that doesn't even approach beta. But already they can see ships roaming the seas of North America, discovering islands along the East Coast and even one or two in the Midwest.

"It is a very funny experience to check in on the game now and then," Slavin said.

But more important than the game is what it represents, a way to get people excited about location based games.

"One of the things we find when you talk about building location based games is that people blank out," Slavin said. "The response to Plundr is so specific and excited because it has a single image."

Slavin and Lantz hope to one day show that location can be every bit as interesting and successful concept in gaming as motion or guitar-shaped peripherals have proven to be.

"When you show a Wii game you often show the player, to us that's a turning point," Lantz said. "We are interested in games as a system that have people in them. And we are really, really interested in how all of these machines are talking to each other. We don't want to make games for a single machine."

"The emerging network, that is the real world, that is the platform we are developing for," Slavin added. "There's a scenario in Plundr's development where some people are playing on their phone, on their DS, on their PSP but the world they play in will be persistent."

We're hoping to incorporate that functionality in the very near future - from a local level at the moment to a global level probably within the next six months. If I have my MP3 Walkman or my iPod, or digital camera connected to PS3 then I can access those devices, too.

Okay, cool. Since I'll probably have my iPod with me when I travel, what about a USB hard drive? Can I access my hundreds of gigs of porn when I'm in Tokyo this September? Michael McWhertor

The rise of the handheld console [BBC]