The game that gamifies payphones
In April, Kris Norris, a 19-year-old Brisbane student, created PayphoneGo, a game that turns Australia's remaining payphones into points-scoring destinations. Players are assigned a nine-digit ID, which they enter after calling the game's number from a payphone. Norris connected the numbers of every payphone in Australia on her backend, so when players call in with their ID, they automatically accrue points. The first person to call from a payphone gets 20 points and can leave a voicemail that's uploaded to the website and played to subsequent visitors. The second visitor receives 10 points, then five, then one.
Norris said she created the game to encourage people to “go out into the community, out into the world and explore.” She described it as “based on the idea of going back to [the] old internet: no ads, no tracking, so few cookies.” She added, “I hate how commercialised and corporate the internet has become. I want to be able to make things just for the sake of having things for people to play. And payphones are a vital public service, but most people will just pass them, and ignore them.”
How payphones remain relevant
Since mid-2021, calls on Telstra payphones have been free, a move the telecommunications giant said would help protect vulnerable Australians. Australia’s universal service guarantee (USG) mandates under federal law that Telstra provide reasonable access to public payphones to all Australians – regardless of profitability. About 4,000 of the 14,000 payphones also offer free wifi. The benefit for Telstra is advertising dollars. The telco doesn’t publicly disclose revenue from ads displayed on its payphones, but the USG allows it to place phones in high-traffic areas, avoiding usual planning controls. This has led to backlash from some councils. In 2019, a coalition successfully took Telstra to court over a proposal for nearly 3-metre-tall phone booths.
Telstra’s payphone product owner, Pete Manwaring, says more than 100m calls have been made since fees were scrapped and usage has tripled, with 4m calls made from Sydney’s 1,918 payphones in the past year alone. More than a third of all calls placed from phone booths are to emergency services or other critical support numbers. Manwaring says payphones remain an “incredibly important” essential service. About 37% of calls are to emergency services, helplines and government support numbers – including triple zero or crisis lines. Another 33% go to utilities.
Why this matters for public connectivity
Payphones were introduced in Australia in the late 1890s to help overcome the tyranny of distance. At their peak, in the 1990s, there were 80,000 payphones across the country. Associate Prof Mark Gregory, from RMIT’s school of engineering, says a few years ago there were 20,000, 40% more than today. He says the lost 6,000 should be reinstalled and all payphones should offer free wifi. “The cost for the upkeep of payphones isn’t huge, and there is a trade-off because, of course, there’s the advertising and marketing opportunity,” he says. “The universal service guarantee is one of the few things that sets Australia aside from other nations in terms of telecommunications. We need to stand up and fight for it.”
For players like GippslandGuardian, who has visited 106 payphones since late April, the game creates a strange sense of connection. He left a voicemail at a Sydney CBD payphone describing a serene small park, a man with an interesting cap, and an ibis. “I guess they’ll be immortalised in this phone voicemail forever,” he said. The game has 14,000 remaining payphones across the country, in far-flung locations like the Oodnadatta Track and Lord Howe Island.
What's next for the game and payphones
As PayphoneGo grows, it may draw more attention to the remaining payphones and their role as a public service. Norris hopes the game encourages exploration and appreciation of these often-overlooked fixtures. Meanwhile, Telstra continues to maintain the network under the USG, with advertising revenue offsetting costs. The future of payphones may depend on public support and regulatory frameworks, as well as creative uses like PayphoneGo that remind people of their value.
Source: The Guardian.
