The beep coming from your PDA is not a reminder for a meeting. It's a trull trying to communicate. Shouting, it looks at you from the screen. The only thing to do is to scribble some runes to make it quiet. Then run to the next holy place.

This is a perfectly real scenario, and has been since the release of The Visby Game,—an adventure computer game set not in the usual fantasy world but in the town of Visby, Sweden. The trull is a character in the game, and together you visit mystical places both in the physical world and the game world.

The choice of Visby for the game setting is no coincidence. This small, medieval town is the home of Zero-Game Studio, an applied research lab specializing in games. A dozen leading computer games researchers from all over the world have settled at this two-year-old lab to investigate what a game really is -- and what it could be. Zero-Game is part of a company called the Interactive Institute, which is owned by a Swedish research foundation that is itself controlled and financed by the Swedish government.

創庵の佐々木さんなんか、こんなのあったらハマっちゃいそうですね。日本版の提携とか申し出てみます？