Day Of The Figurines is a mass participation artwork using mobile phones in which up to 1000 players create a character and play together via SMS over 24 days.

Day Of The Figurines is set in a decaying English town. The starting point for the game is a large model town – installed in a public space – and to begin players are invited to create their own figurine: to answer questions about its past and what it looks like. They then see him or her placed in the town. Thereafter, participation in the game is via SMS on the player’s own mobile phone.

The goal of the game is to help other people. Players receive a minimum of one SMS a day updating them on the progress of their figurine and are invited to make increasingly challenging decisions on the fate of themselves and other players in response to deteriorating circumstances. The board provides a rich stimulus for game play, establishes the mood and provides a snapshot of the game.

A number of innovations in SMS assist in the experience: automated message handling and interpretation filter incoming SMSs to allow more fluid interactions, message aggregation uses spare characters to give players extra information and the flow of messages fluctuates to support varied levels of engagement.

Day Of The Figurines is the world’s first MUD (Multi-User Domain) for mobile phones. It exploits the slowness of the game to insert a work of art into the interstices of our daily lives.

Supported by: Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming; Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham; Sony Net Services Berlin; Fraunhofer Institute, Bonn; the Arts Council UK