As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little …

As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little guy around in the game. I just wrote a new such game. It runs in a web page: Walkzee. (Because Apple hates the web, if you visit Walkzee on your iPhone and you, like 99.9% of iPhone users have the default web browser and haven't turned on the enable geolocation setting, the game will do nothing.) I'm still tweaking the game. I play it as I walk around; then sit down and fix bugs when I get home. As of today, it might be of more interest to Mystery Hunt players than walkers: there are no instructions, so half the challenge is figuring out how to play.

Screen shot of a web app. There's a big green square that has dice scattered across it. Down below are some buttons,some of which have die-face titles; others just have black dots. It's very mysterious

Why am I writing yet-another walking-around phone game? The previous such game I wrote ran on top of Google Cloud Services. You might remember a few months back, I switched my backups to not use Google servers, run by a will-abet-genocide-for-$$$ division within Google. Some days ago, I wondered: "Why is Google still billing me?" My little walking-around game didn't make Google's servers think very hard—it almost squeaked under the threshhold to run for free. But it was a little over, and thus Google was billing me.

I wrote this new game so that it does all of its thinking and data storage on the phone, not on some server elsewhere on the net. Then I shut down my old game that was running on Google's computers. Now I won't send money directly to Google's pro-genocide division. This means giving up some server-y features. In the old game, when my phone broke, my score was still saved on some Google machine; so when I got a new phone and resumed play, my big ol' score showed up. In this new game, if I get a new phone, I'll have to start all over building up my score. <sarcasm>oh no…</sarcasm>

(If you do care about scores and furthermore you read this blog mostly because you're into puzzles, have you tried https://huzzlepub.com/? At Huzzlepub, you can paste in your daily Wordle, Toddle, Raddle,… uh, all those daily puzzles, you can paste in that "share your score with your friends" thingy, and it will let you compare your scores with your peers, thus reminding you that Tyler Hinman is still better at crosswords than you are.)

No, I don't think this will change Google's behavior. I'm imagining some Google exec: "We were willing to toss out 'Don't be evil' to get that $$$ military contract, but Larry shut down his app and that little app pays for a cup of coffee every four months, so—uh, make that five months, I want to leave a decent tip or else the barista will spit in my drink." Yeah, no, this isn't changing anything important, aside from me being able to look myself in the mirror; well, OK, that's kinda important.

*Yes, I mean geolocation using GPS and other means.