Operation Times Square is an urban game and a large-scale experiment on mobile sensing.

The game is about emerging stories. The stories are based on the everyday environment of the players. No single player makes up the story, rather it is generated by the collective behavior of all the players. A part of the excitement is the unpredictability of the stories; it is impossible to know in the beginning how a story will look like. However, we provide some loose themes, such as dining out, entertainment or commuting, around which the stories are let to grow. The themes are about something that every person can naturally relate to, spiced with some unique twist provided by the local players.

The stories are made of words and images: words are picked up from a large predefined pool and images are produced by the players using camera phones. Images are not taken randomly, but they are based on words which act as seeds for the images. The main hook of the game is the imaginative associations between words and images which the players come up with.

The players are not alone in Manhattan. They are accompanied by the rest of the world through the Web. Half of the game is happening on the web site, which gives Webizens a direct way to participate in the fun. Following the recent trend of the Web 2.0, making Web pages more lively, more collaborative and more straightforward to access, we give individual visitors an opportunity to affect the game's progress in real-time. Moreover, we visualize how individual contributions pile up in the Web. The idea is to bridge global and local, physical and virtual in a seamless manner. The web players are responsible for picking up the words, while the players in Manhattan try to find the corresponding images.

All this is shown on a large public display in Times Square, NYC. The audience in front of the display is encouraged to visit the web page and participate in the game. However we respect the fact that some people just want to sit down and follow how the stories start to emerge.