As attested by this Battleship:GoogleEarth , it seems that Julian is moving towards his "near future laboratory experiments". His idea was to start thinking about "how Google Earth could become a platform for realtime mobile gaming". An instantiation of this was then to transfr the simple game mechanic based on the old Milton Bradley Battleship game to a Google Earth platform.

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.

Why do I blog this? it's very relevant and way beyond current google map games.