Photos: Frank Lantz, Kevin Slavin, Sebastian Quack

Although the term big game commonly refers to wildlife ripe for hunting on an African safari, it’s taken on another connotation here in the urban jungle, thanks mainly to designer Frank Lantz. Back in 2004, as part of a class he teaches in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Lantz created Pac-Manhattan, a real-life street version of the arcade classic, in which players dressed as Pac-Man characters maneuvered around Washington Square Park using cell phones and Wi-Fi technology. It was the first city-situated “big game,” a growing genre that is now getting its own olympiad with the inaugural Come Out and Play festival, happening September 22–24.

Organized by Greg Trefry, Mattia Romeo, Nick Fortugno, Catherine Herdilck and Peter Lee, Come Out and Play resulted from Trefry attending Lantz’s class. But once he completed the course, he realized that there really wasn’t anyplace to actually go out and play big games. His solution: an organized festival.

“I wanted to make the whole world a new space to play in,” says Trefry, and indeed, Come Out and Play will provide ample opportunity to do just that, with a schedule including Plundr (in which participants on laptops pretend to be pirates operating out of island bases) and Cruel 2 B Kind (in which players stalk each other and carry out “benevolent” assassinations involving good deeds). You might think this all sounds like a huge case of arrested development, but Trefry doesn’t seem to care. He calls the games “massively addictive,” adding that his ultimate goal is to anoint New York as the “big-game capital of the world” by making Come Out and Play an annual affair. He probably won’t lack for sponsors; cell-phone giant Nokia is already in on the act, sponsoring a Times Square–set game called Manhattan Mash-Up.

Lantz himself has created three new big games for the festival. “I enjoy the way they blur the line between real and imaginary,” he says, “but really I just like that they are intensely fun.” Best of all, they don’t involve lions or tigers or bears.—Noah Davis