Chromaroma: the makeover London commuting has been waiting for

The middle of a chaotic London Tube strike might not seem the best moment to launch an Oyster card travel game, but that's exactly what the team behind Chromaroma is doing today.

On the plus side, gaining a few points for getting out a stop early - whether you'd planned to or not - might make London's infuriating public transport system seem a little more fun. But, concedes creator Toby Barnes, the developers are aware that the strike is quite painful enough "without someone saying 'come and play our game'!" he admits.

Photo by wearemudlark. Some rights reserved.

So what can Chromaroma do to transform your nightmare commute? The idea started with a preoccupation with what Barnes calls "data shadows", part of the digital footprint we all leave behind. With the Oyster card, those of us in London leave a record of every journey, every date and every time, and mostly see those journeys as something to endured - as an obstacle to be cleared before the real day can begin.

Mix that with a healthy curiosity for history, geography and storytelling, and a love of the  that with the geeky 'chartiness' of Last.fm and you get a web-based social game that enables and encourages you to explore the city. It doesn't need a phone or a screen, and you can use the Tube, buses and now Boris bikes. And once you start building up a picture of your Oyster use, the site begins to map it out for you on a deliciously slick map of London. Join a team, assign a home station and you're off.

"Commuting can be quite dull, uncomfortable and a chore," said Barnes. "We wanted to make the commute something to take you beyond that. What games can you play in your head? Creating a framework that allows people to be a bit more dynamic, to go very slightly go outside the realms of going from A to B - it's amazing what you discover, the people you bump into and the things you see. When you can find a new route thorugh a city or find out some of the things that happened where you are, that's when a little bit of magic happens."

Chromaroma also shows it pays to explore beyond the map design monopoly of Google. "We're all Harry Beck fans," says Barnes. "We didn't want to do the Open Street Map dot thing - we wanted to do something that at least we felt could stand somewhere near him." The result was what he describes as "the world's first 3D space Flash live data mashup thing".

The idea first came out of the phase when every developer seemed to be extracting the RFID chip from their Oyster card and investigating how much memory it had. " We were all very excited by that but it was probably the wrong way of going about it - as well being illegal," says Barnes. "So we started looking at the infrastructure that was already in place. With the Oyster card there is, literally, tons of data being generated and stored."

Barnes is managing director of Mudlark, an ambitious and imaginative collective of designers and developers. The team has already produced the Romeo and Juliet-inspired Twitter play Such Tweet Sorrow, a mobile heart rate monitoring game called Heartlands and Civic Dashboard, which creates a hub of useful information for Birmingham residents. Chromaroma is less a moneyspinner than an experiment that combines their interests in visualisation, storytelling and psychogeography - the impact of location and environment on emotions. To play with the idea of 'fear' in Chromaroma, for example, virtual props have been introduced including a leech that players can plant at stations to sap points from other teams, and then armour and mirrors to defend and deflect against those.

It has taken Mudlark a year to build and release Chromaroma, with support from Screen West Midlands and the now-defunct Channel 4 4ip innovation fund. The game is also entirely dependent on Transport for London for the data that populates Chromaroma. So isn't that a risk? And what has been their experience of working with them? "They've come a very long way," says Barnes. "It's an organisation based in Victorian times, with its feet fixed in steam travel. So this is a whole new era for them and they are really trying to get their heads around what it means to be a data company. But it's a challenge - they're not just letting us do what we want."

The logistics of extracting data from TFL means it take 48 hours for Chromaroma to update; something of a lag for the online games space which has bene spoilt by the immediacy of most online tools. Real time would be fun, says Barnes, but he doesn't seem to want to pile the pressure onto TFL. "A lot of people very aggressive at TFL about forcing them to do things, but the more I've learnt about them the more I've been amazed they do as much as they do. It's like trying to balance 15 metal balls on a glass plate... they have started delivering APIs and station data, and they are changing the way they are doing things."

Photo by wearemudlark. Some rights reserved

Chromaroma has big ambitions, but its biggest challenge seems to be deciding which ideas to develop first. Advertisers are talking to them about the storytelling and message side of the project, not least in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where billboards are banned. Battersea Power Staton - which is notoriously awkward to get to by public transport - is interested in the project, and with the Olympics are on the horizon, there will be millions more visitors to London exploring the city on public transport.

The biggest vision is to turn Chromaroma global and have international cities competing against each other - Tokyo v Paris, London v Moscow. "And we're looking at new game layers that would enable people to skin the game in different ways, so you could have a Victorian gas lamp London with Holmes and Moriaty, or a Warren Ellis 2050 underwater London that you explore with a jetpack."

Is this just another example of the gameification of everything? Actually, you could blame Barnes for some of that. With his event organiser hat on, it was Barnes and friends that loaded the Playful conference stage for the past two years with speakers who extolled the virtues and value of gaming to the world. Add some mayors to this! Add some points to that! So was that what he meant?

"This year I stood up and said we were sorry - that we'd messed it up," says Barnes. "We had people talking about the value of games - and everyone took what we said and ran with it. It's like they'd seen a disco in a film, then got a record and put a beat over it and said 'Look! It's dance music!' It might look like dance music and sound like dance music, but it's not dance music."

He does believe that gameification is important, but that it has to be done by games designers, and it's not just about points and badges. "It needs to be playful, about exploring things, a sense of achievement and building things. There are strong emotions you can only have with an interactive game."