This is a very novel and great idea! Julian Bleecker, a Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication has come up with this game by using Google Earth as “a platform for realtime mobile gaming”:

“The mechanic I’m experimenting with is simpler. One person places their ships
using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a
mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python
script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which
then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game
grid. When the player who’s trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit,
they call into the game engine and say “drop”. The game reads back the
coordinates at which the “peg” was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other
player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits
one of the ships, it’s a Hit, otherwise it’s a miss. ”

I don’t see myself putting up the effort, though. But I have to say…the ideas are just blossoming in my head on something I might actually want to do! I’m thinking games that may take a while though!
Yeah…I would know absolutely nothing interesting if it wasn’t for Mark Wallace.

Oooh…and this might not be the right place to write about this – but you REALLY should check out the Project Good Luck blog! It’s a bunch of MIT students who are on a trip to explore “social networks and their intersection with mobile media” in CHINA(I’m so freakin envious)!! I emphasise ‘really’ because I haven’t been in for a look since Henry Jenkins mentioned it (trying to be selective on my subscription feeds)….and they’ve really done a lot of cool stuff since then!!! Very enjoyable and EXTREMELY interesting!!!