Please consider extending the game at least by a couple weeks! I’m very curious what percent of all California payphones could be captured with an extended game. I know the game’s phone number isn’t free but I’m sure it could be largely covered by donations.
Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.
Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.
Landline phone calls should just be free at this point. Put like 0.0001% of mobile profit into a fund and surely you can maintain the existing POTS payphone base. POTS-quality voice is like a rounding error in bandwidth, but we're saddled with POTS-era costs for connections.
You are underestimating just how many people that are out there that want free long distances calls lol. I worked at a phone company and this was a never ending persistent security issue. There are lots of tricky ways to get someone to pay for your long distance call. If the pay phone was free then the local provider would be on the hook for those calls.
Just block long distance calls right? If it was that simple it would not be a persistent issue.
This is amazing. I would love to have this game in France! We have a geocaching scene (https://www.geocaching.com/, https://france-geocaching.fr/), but I really like the idea with payphones and this system of calling to claim findings.
The "love letter to a disappearing piece of infrastructure" bit makes me think of the payphone pictures that are published in each of 2600 magazine issues: https://www.2600.com/payphones
Another cool "just get out there" thing is the Degree Confluence Project. Just checked, and even the web site is still old school. https://confluence.org/
I've been peripherally involved in an early stages effort to build something similar for the entire nation (https://reportapayphone.com/), and became aware of this just recently. It's a really great example to aspire to, in terms of the level of polish. I do find the time limiting odd; our goal is to identify as many payphones as possible this way.
Unfortunately the state of payphone-related records is extremely poor, with many ostensibly-active PSPs having quietly gone out of business, other PSPs reorganized without reregistering, and states themselves keeping PSP records very poorly. Throw in small-scale COCOT operations and the result is that there really isn't any authoritative database of possible payphones, so this website's map is going to be missing some. It will also include many that are nonfunctional, as today's PSPs seem to do close to zero maintenance and out of service phones stay that way for years.
Some of the nation's largest PSPs have become ghosts, with the phones still operating and able to accept payment, but the PSP completely unresponsive to efforts to contact them. It's a very strange afterlife.
I'm absolutely going hunting for some nearby payphones this weekend!
In the recording on this one [1] the caller states that the payphone is on the caltrain station platform, but on the map it's about 1000 feet from there. Searching the address on google maps correctly shows it at the station, though.
I know of a working payphone that is not on the Payphone Go map. Photo: https://i.postimg.cc/Dw4sCDpJ/payphone.jpg
The fact that I know of one makes me wonder, are there are others? Is the list the author obtained from PUC incomplete? Is this phone operating unlicensed? Has the phone died since I last visited a year ago?
I just visited the closest one to me during lunch. There was just a single dot in the middle of a huge county building. I had to walk through security to get there. I asked if there was a payphone around and the guard said no. Luckily someone else knew. One out of two phones didn't work. The other did, so now my best clean original joke can be heard by anyone.
There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.
Ya know, I just spun up a version of a user-driven exploration game, as an homage to the sf0.org from back in the aughts. https://irl2-production.up.railway.app/
Google auth still not hooked up, but otherwise good enough for now. And it's open source.
This is a fun idea. It occurs to me that I would enjoy seeing unvisited phones on the map in a different color. [Edit: Oh, now I see green dots for visited phones. Was this always there and I just hadn't noticed?]
Been following this guy's work for a bit now, and I feel like it's more in the spirit of what art is supposed to be than what you see in 99% of galleries these days.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, and impossible to prove, but I've long suspected I might be the youngest person in the U.S. to have won tickets from radio stations both from a rotary phone (at home, ~1989) and from a payphone (while I was delivering pizzas ~1990).
Unfortunately I've never really taken advantage of my absurd luck to do something more useful, like retire early.
It looks like Mark Thomas maintained a phone number database up until 2007 or 2023 for many areas in the USA. I guess that could be a basis for starting 'my own' instance of payphone-go, maybe with twilio (or equivalent) to receive the calls.
This works because California requires licensing for payphones and Riley was able to FOIA state payphone database. I'm not sure if other states require licenses for payphones.
I think it's harder to spoof toll free numbers. For example, you can't block caller ID in the same way. I'm sure it's still possible to spoof, but just might be a little harder.
That's happening piecemeal in the US as well. Any "landline" phone service at this point will be coming from a box hooked up to your internet service, quite the flip from the old days of dialup internet.
I still have a copper landline direct to a real central office; for my Mother in Law. $60/month and the phone company made it very difficult to setup 3 years ago; they really don't seem to want to be a phone company anymore.
Pulse dialing still works, and the automated voicemail system that the CO switch runs has zero perceptible latency (unfortunately, they won't give me the PIN to set it up)
The dismantling is usually faster in other countries, as Telcoms owning this equipment either are or were state owned monopolies. In the US, the payphones were probly owned and swapped and back and forth between myriad providers.
Quick telephony question: how can calls from payphones to (888) 683-6697 be toll-free for the caller? I’m Japanese, so I may be missing something, but I don’t understand the mechanism that makes this free (or low-cost enough) to run as a free service.
Most countries have some numbers with receiver pays or reverse billing as a feature. Sometimes called 'free phone'.
My research says Japan has several prefixes, 0120, 0800, 0088, 0531, although not all phone numbers in these prefixes are available to all callers.
In the US, holders of a toll free number pay their carrier a per minute rate (sometimes with billing increments of 1 second), as well as a fee per call from payphones.
The per minute pricing is pretty reasonable typically one or two cents per minute; I think the per call cost from a payphone are more significant, although I don't see this listed by most providers; I seem to recall it being pretty hefty (and some toll free numbers would not accept calls from payphones as a result), but maybe changes in the network and intercarrier billing have resulted in a smaller fee or it's just not relevant to most people because payphones are hard to find.
In many cities there are "Emergency Call Boxes" throughout the streets that are distinct from payphones but operate similarly in that they allow you to get in contact with emergency services.
With Asterisk and some voip client (even some modern phones) and some ZMachine modules you could play from Zork to tons of adventure games for the ZMachine at IFDB, from Anchorhead to Tristam Island.
Which is kinda the reverse of this, reusing phones to play a text adventure.
This is brilliant and makes me wish even more that I still lived in California -- hopefully this could extend the the entire Left Coast if there's enough payphones to warrant it.
Please consider extending the game at least by a couple weeks! I’m very curious what percent of all California payphones could be captured with an extended game. I know the game’s phone number isn’t free but I’m sure it could be largely covered by donations.
Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.
Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.
Landline phone calls should just be free at this point. Put like 0.0001% of mobile profit into a fund and surely you can maintain the existing POTS payphone base. POTS-quality voice is like a rounding error in bandwidth, but we're saddled with POTS-era costs for connections.
It's not the traffic but the CO equipment and copper line maintenance.
You are underestimating just how many people that are out there that want free long distances calls lol. I worked at a phone company and this was a never ending persistent security issue. There are lots of tricky ways to get someone to pay for your long distance call. If the pay phone was free then the local provider would be on the hook for those calls.
Just block long distance calls right? If it was that simple it would not be a persistent issue.
I agree, I need more time to score! extend the game!
This is amazing. I would love to have this game in France! We have a geocaching scene (https://www.geocaching.com/, https://france-geocaching.fr/), but I really like the idea with payphones and this system of calling to claim findings.
The "love letter to a disappearing piece of infrastructure" bit makes me think of the payphone pictures that are published in each of 2600 magazine issues: https://www.2600.com/payphones
Another cool "just get out there" thing is the Degree Confluence Project. Just checked, and even the web site is still old school. https://confluence.org/
My personal contribution: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=3402
Anyway would love to play this payphone game, if only as an excuse for bike outings, but it's only for California and I don't live there.
I've been peripherally involved in an early stages effort to build something similar for the entire nation (https://reportapayphone.com/), and became aware of this just recently. It's a really great example to aspire to, in terms of the level of polish. I do find the time limiting odd; our goal is to identify as many payphones as possible this way.
Unfortunately the state of payphone-related records is extremely poor, with many ostensibly-active PSPs having quietly gone out of business, other PSPs reorganized without reregistering, and states themselves keeping PSP records very poorly. Throw in small-scale COCOT operations and the result is that there really isn't any authoritative database of possible payphones, so this website's map is going to be missing some. It will also include many that are nonfunctional, as today's PSPs seem to do close to zero maintenance and out of service phones stay that way for years.
Some of the nation's largest PSPs have become ghosts, with the phones still operating and able to accept payment, but the PSP completely unresponsive to efforts to contact them. It's a very strange afterlife.
I'm absolutely going hunting for some nearby payphones this weekend!
In the recording on this one [1] the caller states that the payphone is on the caltrain station platform, but on the map it's about 1000 feet from there. Searching the address on google maps correctly shows it at the station, though.
eta: found it on street view! [2]
[1] https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=398
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/4pzjemwUqHYgnLHs8
Honorable mention: https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=1599
I don't know why but I find this person very cute with how excited they sound about the local library.
Will try to find some payphones myself.
https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=592
My new favorite fishing story.
https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=1451
> Shout out to [...], I love you guys. Platonically.
I know of a working payphone that is not on the Payphone Go map. Photo: https://i.postimg.cc/Dw4sCDpJ/payphone.jpg The fact that I know of one makes me wonder, are there are others? Is the list the author obtained from PUC incomplete? Is this phone operating unlicensed? Has the phone died since I last visited a year ago?
I just visited the closest one to me during lunch. There was just a single dot in the middle of a huge county building. I had to walk through security to get there. I asked if there was a payphone around and the guard said no. Luckily someone else knew. One out of two phones didn't work. The other did, so now my best clean original joke can be heard by anyone.
There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.
Real world exploration games like this and Jet Lagged: The Game Hide and Seek are just so cool.
I’d play it if payphones from my state were included! I don’t know if they are licensed/registered here though.
Ya know, I just spun up a version of a user-driven exploration game, as an homage to the sf0.org from back in the aughts. https://irl2-production.up.railway.app/
Google auth still not hooked up, but otherwise good enough for now. And it's open source.
Ohhh interesting - thanks
Nice, by playing this you’re also supporting the continued existence of the phones (in a small way) since the toll-free number pays them.
The Ebervector guy is hilarious! Love them Blok's, Mandelstam's and Pushkin's lyrics, thank you for bringing up such beautiful poetry
Would benefit from seasons i.e. wipe the leaderboard every once in a while
This is a fun idea. It occurs to me that I would enjoy seeing unvisited phones on the map in a different color. [Edit: Oh, now I see green dots for visited phones. Was this always there and I just hadn't noticed?]
Been following this guy's work for a bit now, and I feel like it's more in the spirit of what art is supposed to be than what you see in 99% of galleries these days.
If you just want to find a payphone: <https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2lHO>
Cool, thanks for this. It seems this data comes from OpenStreeMap and has some phones not listed in Payphone-Go. Curious about the discrepancy.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, and impossible to prove, but I've long suspected I might be the youngest person in the U.S. to have won tickets from radio stations both from a rotary phone (at home, ~1989) and from a payphone (while I was delivering pizzas ~1990).
Unfortunately I've never really taken advantage of my absurd luck to do something more useful, like retire early.
Please expand this to other states. This is such a fun and creative idea.
It looks like Mark Thomas maintained a phone number database up until 2007 or 2023 for many areas in the USA. I guess that could be a basis for starting 'my own' instance of payphone-go, maybe with twilio (or equivalent) to receive the calls.
[0] https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/ going through the state map feature only shows a subset compared to navigating through the links on this page.
This works because California requires licensing for payphones and Riley was able to FOIA state payphone database. I'm not sure if other states require licenses for payphones.
Probably could just ask the phone companies. Free advertising to visit their dying phones?
I second this! I'd love to have this for PA or NJ.
This is really cool, I wonder if it would be doable in other countries? In particular UK?
See my comment elsewhere in this thread...
> Every payphone has a unique phone number. When you call (888) 683-6697, I see the number you're calling from and match it in my database.
Has anybody tried to win by spoofing the caller ID? For science, of course.
I think it's harder to spoof toll free numbers. For example, you can't block caller ID in the same way. I'm sure it's still possible to spoof, but just might be a little harder.
In Denmark there are no payphones. Like none. The copper network is being decommissioned.
That's happening piecemeal in the US as well. Any "landline" phone service at this point will be coming from a box hooked up to your internet service, quite the flip from the old days of dialup internet.
I still have a copper landline direct to a real central office; for my Mother in Law. $60/month and the phone company made it very difficult to setup 3 years ago; they really don't seem to want to be a phone company anymore.
Pulse dialing still works, and the automated voicemail system that the CO switch runs has zero perceptible latency (unfortunately, they won't give me the PIN to set it up)
The dismantling is usually faster in other countries, as Telcoms owning this equipment either are or were state owned monopolies. In the US, the payphones were probly owned and swapped and back and forth between myriad providers.
Kudos for pulling all these into one database
That is super fun, if I had a motorcycle in Cali, I would so do this!
Quick telephony question: how can calls from payphones to (888) 683-6697 be toll-free for the caller? I’m Japanese, so I may be missing something, but I don’t understand the mechanism that makes this free (or low-cost enough) to run as a free service.
Most countries have some numbers with receiver pays or reverse billing as a feature. Sometimes called 'free phone'.
My research says Japan has several prefixes, 0120, 0800, 0088, 0531, although not all phone numbers in these prefixes are available to all callers.
In the US, holders of a toll free number pay their carrier a per minute rate (sometimes with billing increments of 1 second), as well as a fee per call from payphones.
The per minute pricing is pretty reasonable typically one or two cents per minute; I think the per call cost from a payphone are more significant, although I don't see this listed by most providers; I seem to recall it being pretty hefty (and some toll free numbers would not accept calls from payphones as a result), but maybe changes in the network and intercarrier billing have resulted in a smaller fee or it's just not relevant to most people because payphones are hard to find.
the owner of the (888) 683-6697 line pays for incoming calls
I wonder if Chicago's last payphone still exists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt9Vs4k80m8 (2022)
I love this, it's so creative. The audio recordings were a great idea
I think every modern state should have some emergency phones. Not everyone has a smartphone, available at all times.
In many cities there are "Emergency Call Boxes" throughout the streets that are distinct from payphones but operate similarly in that they allow you to get in contact with emergency services.
I'm sure most strangers or businesses would call 911 for you if you asked and appeared to need it
quite cool man.
wonder what the benefits could be of the game. one is that we now know which phones are tested ok.
also it can be like a local public radio where anyone could come in and voice something...
enjoyed playing with this.
Damn this needs building for the UK payphones there are a dying breed too and they used to be everywhere
We actually ran something similar in the UK a couple of years ago but had to shut it down due high costs.
However we recently figured out how to do it in a way that won't bankrupt us, so keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks...
https://payphone.team
In Germany some of the booths were converted into public libraries, those that people use to freely exchange books.
They are rare, but I have already spot some in the wild.
yeh UK went from 100,000+ now i think theres 20,000 left half of those i bet dont work
As a GIS programmer and a payphone nerd. I love love love this.
The recording left on this one is super weird and creepy like its from some ARG game which I guess is appropriate.
The next night we ate whale, the next night we ate whale.
https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=592
Runner Up this one playing "Im at a payphone" song
https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=576
the whale thing is from a really great poem by Tao Lin. You can watch him perform the whole thing on youtube
How is it verifying the calling line? Via ANI, or CID?
Trying to win this from your couch, I see...
It's in good fun, physically visiting them is way more fun than handing a SIP trunk to a short script + CSV file.
The nerd in me is just always curious about the backend :)
Incredible idea. I love this so much.
Love this kind of stuff
What a cool idea. Love it!
Can you hear me?
With Asterisk and some voip client (even some modern phones) and some ZMachine modules you could play from Zork to tons of adventure games for the ZMachine at IFDB, from Anchorhead to Tristam Island.
Which is kinda the reverse of this, reusing phones to play a text adventure.
The recording for the one at the golden gate bridge made me laugh.
This is amazing
This is amazing
This is brilliant and makes me wish even more that I still lived in California -- hopefully this could extend the the entire Left Coast if there's enough payphones to warrant it.
more Silicon Valley/California xenophilia? </sarcasm>