"Big games": hybrids between the real world and video games, are popping up in urban areas:

Somewhere out there on the streets of Greenwich Village, a fellow student was running around in a yellow Pac-Man suit. His four pursuers, code-named Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, aimed to track him down and snuff him out — the sooner, the better.

"Our strategy is a dragnet to block all the roads Pac-Man might go down," said Michael Olson, a k a Clyde the ghost. "You take that street," he said to Pinky, as he pointed to a map of the Village. "And I'll take this one."

So began a test run for a game of Pac-Manhattan, a real-world version of the 1980's video game played on the streets of New York and the latest example of a so-called "big game": a contest that uses wireless devices like cellphones and global positioning beacons to track players as they move through the urban grid, turning cities into vast game boards. Big games, with some players online and others pounding the pavement, have been staged in the last year in Minneapolis, Las Vegas and London.

Frank Lantz, who teaches a class on the subject in N.Y.U.'s Interactive Telecommunications Program and whose students designed Pac-Manhattan, said the games are a somewhat whimsical response to the convergence of digital and physical space. Because millions of people conduct important aspects of their lives, including shopping, banking and communicating, online, Professor Lantz said, "online spaces are becoming a new form of public space." At the same time, he said, wireless technologies like cellphones, global positioning systems and personal digital assistants have added a virtual component to the physical world. Big games, he said, take place in the overlap between the two. For players, the allure of big games is based on a less theoretical premise: bigger games equal more fun.

....In the last year, a London-based group called Blast Theory has run two big games — Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You — that allowed hundreds of online players to communicate with runners on the ground who were charged with making their way through the city in search of clues. The group plans to bring Uncle Roy to the United States later this year.

On grade-school campuses in England, a consortium of technologists has been running a game called Savannah, in which teams of students simulate the lives of lions - complete with virtual hunting, scouting for water and forming and dissolving prides - by communicating with one another over cellphones and computers, the way lions communicate by roaring.

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