Design of networked games to support users located around the world

The last issue of Communication of the ACM is about "entertainment networking". One of the paper is interestingly dealing with the design of networked games to support users located around the world. As described by Cormac J. Sreenan and Kobus van der Merwe in their introduction:

Jeremy Brun et al. consider how to design networked games to support users located around the world. In this context they explore distributed servers and the relationship between network latency and fairness in networked games. Differences in latency can lead to inconsistency in game state, giving certain users an unfair advantage over others. This problem is exacerbated in situations in which decisions concerning the game state are made on distributed servers, rather than through the more conventional centralized server architecture. The authors identify two techniques that are useful for mitigating these effects: trading inconsistencies and judiciously selecting the location of the distributed servers. The article should be of particular interest to companies interested in scaling-up game servers for use by a truly global subscriber base.

Why do I blog this? I like the authors stance "A game can be considered playable if its users find its performance acceptable in terms of THE PERCEPTUAL EFFECT OF ITS INEVITABLE INCONSISTENCIES" and I wonder to what extent it would be possible to do seamful design (i.e. using the latency as an element of gameplay).

Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games

(via)Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games is a workshop at the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference organized by Elise van den Hoven and Ali Mazalek.

Many people of all ages play games, such as board games, PC games or console games. They like game play for a variety of reasons: as a pastime, as a personal challenge, to build skills, to interact with others, or simply for fun.

Some gamers prefer board games over newer genres, because it allows them to socialize with other players face-to-face, or because the game play can be very improvisational as players rework the rules or weave stories around an unfolding game. Conversely, other gamers prefer the benefits of digital games on PCs or consoles. These include high quality 3D graphics, the adaptive nature of game engines (e.g. increasing levels of difficulty based on player experience) and an abundance of digital game content to explore and experience.

With the increasing digitization of our everyday lives, the benefits of these separate worlds can be combined in the form of tangible games. For example, tangible games can be played on digital tabletops that provide both an embedded display and a computer to drive player interactions. Several people can thus sit around the table and play digital games together.

Some examples described on the workshop page: Weathergods (Philips Entertaible), Pente (TViews Table), Yellow Cab (Philips Entertaible), Digital Dialogues (TViews Table).

Why do I blog this? how digital world and physical artifacts knit together is an important trend in the future of computing, especially in the context of gaming; that's a dimension I am interested in, especially from the interaction viewpoint: how these new input/output systems would allow playful activities (in context)?

Steven Johnson on Spore

The NYT has a very long and insightful piece called The Long Zoom by Steven Johnson. It's mostly about exemplifying how we have new "ways of seeing” (satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers; Google maps that take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house...) with the future EA game Spore (by Will Wright). Some excerpts (I picked up only 2-3 things but there is A LOT more to say/point at):

it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game. (...) Spore may be more ambitious in scope than these games, but its two most important innovations lie elsewhere: in its system for generating user-created creatures and in the way it allows players to share their creations with others. (...) Spore flips that model [MMORPG] on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”

And of course, fabbing is not that far...

When you visit the Spore studio in Emeryville... Everyone’s desk is populated by plastic action figures of Spore creatures, manufactured in-house by Wright’s employees using a 3-D printer that can generate a physical toy in a matter of minutes from a computer model. (Electronic Arts is investigating the possibility of selling customized Spore critters in toy stores as a side business.)

Why do I blog this? the article is a compelling piece that describes in details how Spore is important, especially regarding new perception and testing of concepts (by creating parallel realities and see them living). In the excerpt above, I picked up only extracts related to the game model aspect because I find interesting how the game designers chose their own direction which is different from the current MMOG one.

Test Outfit in WoW

An interesting service for Worlds of Warcraft: TheoryCraft:

Theorycraft places everything you need to know about your spells right on their tooltips. Or, if you're using the default action bars, on their buttons. Want to have a row of low rank heals with their heal values on the button? Too easy. Not only that, TC can let you compare any gear set you wish. Curious as to how much that crimson felt hat actually increases your dps by? It'll tell you that. Or how much 1 extra crit is worth in spell damage. Or for melee users, how much attack power you'd need to equal another 10 agility, or 1% to crit. Or perhaps just how much damage you would do were you lucky enough to land a Hammer of Bestial Fury or Ashkandi.

It has an ui interface for comparing the dungeon 1, 2 and tier 1 and 2 gear sets to your current gear, or any combination of gear you wish. Just click the button, have a look at your new stats and hold your cursor over a spell to see how much more/less damage you would do in that set. Talents can be tested in a similar way.

Why do I blog this? don't be afraid by the rpg-esque vocabulary, what is important here is that WoW players have a tool that allows them to simulate and compare the use of their gear. How about a similar service for my physical artefacts?

Technorati Tags: MMORPG, wow, videogames

Cheating in multiplayer games

Cheating in multiplayer games is an intriguing issue, and it seems that it begins to receive some attention. See for instance "A Legal Analysis of Cheating in Online Multiplayer Games" by Joel Zetterström. Of course I am less interested by the legal aspects than by the cheating techniques employed in First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy and Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing games. The authors cites a study by Yan and Choi which describes 11 kinds of cheats:

1. Cheating by collusion. This can occur in games where one player is not suppose to know what other players know but exchanges information anyway, such cheat can for example occur in an online version of the card game Bridge. In FPS and RTS, players are allowed and encouraged to cooperate if they play on the same team, and it is very common to do that by using voice chat programs. 2. Cheating by abusing procedure or policy. Some games record wins and losses for each player profile in a statistic database21 and by abusing certain procedures the player can escape having his loss recorded. The winner will therefore not have his win recorded. 3. Cheating related to virtual assets. The trading of virtual assets is a big business worth lots of real money, and thus cheating related to virtual assets is attractive. Trading in MMORPG’s can therefore be abused by certain players who accept the money for an item, but then keep it. 4. Cheating by compromising passwords. Passwords (I would say that this category also includes CD-keys) for online games can be vulnerable targets for malicious users. Once acquired, they can be used access crucial game data and authorization thus enabling cheats in various ways, for example to steal items from another player or to block his access to the game (see number 5 below). 5. Cheating by denying service to peer players. Various techniques, like flooding the other players connection so he times out, or forcing him to disconnect (disconnect hack) at the right time can lead to benefits in computer games. 6. Cheating due to lack of secrecy. Servers and computer communicate with each other with packets of information. These packets can be intercepted and read, or inserted with different data, enabling cheats. 7. Cheating due to lack of authentication. This is cheats related to authentication between server and client. 8. Cheating related to internal misuse. Game operators and system administrators have special power over a gaming environment that could be misused in order to cheat, an example can be to create valuable items in MMORPG’s and sell them. 9. Cheating by social engineering. There are various ways of scamming people to get access to their passwords and CD-keys, e.g. by posing as a system administrator. 10. Cheating by modifying game software or data. This is the traditional way of cheating in online multiplayer games. Cheat-creators can reverse engineer the gaming software and create special programs that can be used to gain unfair advantages. This is also called “hacks”. 11. Cheating by exploiting bug or design flaw.

Why do I blog this? cheats are interesting because it reveals how users detect misuses, flaws and hackable issue, surely a good form of creativity (which is however a problem for game companies).

The Economist on SL

An article in The Economist about Second Life, some excerpts I found interesting:

Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over islands, meander through castles and gawk at dragons. But increasing numbers use Second Life for things that are quite serious. They form support groups for cancer survivors. They rehearse responses to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. They build Buddhist retreats and meditate.

Many use it as an enhanced communications medium. (...) Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments.” From new approaches to corporate branding to education, Second Life is a petri dish for innovations that may help people in real life. Already, therapists are using Second Life to help autistic children, because it is a safe environment to practice giving signals to others and interpreting the ones coming back. Other organisations are using Second Life for long-distance learning. Overall, says Jaron Lanier, the veteran of virtual-reality experiments, Second Life “unquestionably has the potential to improve life outside.”

It's interesting to see how SL creates affordances for new activities in virtual worlds; as if it was holding the promises of 3D virtual reality created 10 years ago. The article also focuses on user-generated content:

Second Life provides its residents with the equivalent of atoms—small elements of virtual matter called “primitives”—so that they can build things from scratch. (...) Because everything about Second Life is intended to make it an engine of creativity, Linden Lab early on decided that residents should own the intellectual property inherent in their creations. Second Life now allows creators to determine whether the stuff they conceive may be copied, modified or transferred. (...) Second Life's total devotion to what is fashionably called “user-generated content” now places it, unlike other MMORPGs, at the centre of a trend called Web 2.0. (...) “It celebrates individuality,” says Jaron Lanier, who pioneered the concept of “virtual reality” in the 1980s and is now “science adviser” at Linden Lab. And it connects people, he says, because “the act of creation is the act of being social.” (...) The Web 2.0 crowd also extols Second Life for its highly original business model.(...) Linden Lab does not sell advertising; instead it is a virtual property company. It makes money when residents lease property—an island, say—by charging an average of $20 per virtual “acre” per month. (...) Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a prominent venture capitalist. But “I don't see any correlation between that and what it's going to take to be a designer and have a skill set to succeed in the world.” (...) Mr Castronova also cautions against overestimating the depth and breadth of Second Life's economy. Yes, people do create clothes and games and spacecraft in Second Life and then sell them. But most of the big money comes from the virtual equivalent of land speculation, as people lease islands, erect pretty buildings and then rent them to others at a premium.

Data mining and MMOG game design

In this Better Game Design through Data Mining feature, David Kennerly nicely describes how data mining can improve MMOG game design. He starts by describing the "why"

Why Mine Data? Because players lie. Player feedback alone provides a poor diagnosis of game design. The picture a player's verbal feedback paints is not even an approximate guide. It is a distorted portrait of psychological and social forces. Players do not accurately report their own behavior in surveys or customer feedback. (...) As political creatures, players, and developers, also revise their reports (...) Data mining also builds better theories. It gives the game designer insight into how players use and abuse the game. It broadens perspective, proves or disproves hypotheses, and substitutes facts in place of opinions

And then look at the possible statistics than can be used, taking as an example "performance" and how it can be derived from diverse indexes (experience point by time). The article also explores test and analyses of hypotheses that can give interesting insights to game designers. Finally, the author presents in which context this can be used, showing examples to balance the economy, catch cheaters, cut production costs or increase customer renewal.

Why do I blog this? I always have been interested in this sort of log mining of games as a complement for qualitative data (like interviews and observation; I am not a great fan of surveys). What is proposed here is simply speaking close to log analysis in human-computer interaction research. This methodology is additionally similar to what Play-On researchers are doing.

This idea also connects with what USC Justin Hall proposed with the concept of "passively mutliplayer games" (see also here).

Game and Culture about WoW

The last issue of academic journal Game and Culture is focused on World of Warcraft. Lots of good papers here, for instance:

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft Abstract: World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated "bots" to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes and races they prefer, and so on. The authors then discuss why and how players remain committed to this game, how WoW’s design partitions players into groups with varying backgrounds and aspirations, and finally how players "consume" the game’s content, with a particular focus on the endgame at Level 60 and the impact of player-versus-player-combat. The data illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs. In several places, it also raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template.

Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft Abstract: A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

Torill Elvira Mortensen WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video Abstract: With the immense popularity of massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), other media as well as game research have discovered gaming as a topic of discussion and study. These discussions, however, tend to ignore the history of both games and of game studies. This article addresses the connections between one of the old and, today, obscure forms of using computers for multiplayer gaming—the text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)—and the current, highly visible and massively used graphic interface game World of Warcraft. These connections range from player style through game-play options to social interaction and player-controlled social modifiers within both types of games. The comparison is based on play, observation, and interviews with players in MUDs and in WoW.

Sony PS3 and geospatial databases

Excerpts from Ken Kutaragi's PS3 keynote at the Tokyo Game Show (taken from joystiq):

"For us in the entertainment industry the other interesting thing for us is the map database ... including map data and dimensions of buildings and so on. You can use the joystiq to fly through the landscape created by the map database. All those peices of data are available ... all the buildings are actually physically built up ... if you look at the building registration data you have all the pieces of information available. If all the data can be collected ... it's going to be beyond whatever you imagine is possible. The landscape required for Ridge Racer... today the game developers have to do that work [manually]. You have to take photos, pictures." (...) "With the PS3 the next gen platform will have powerful ... users themselves using these platforms will upload their personal environment ... the possibility of creating a GMS, a global map system, users will be invited to upload their data. Users will start with all the pieces of information in their living rooom, their favorite restaurant, their school ... of course you have to think about secrecy, but all of that information can be uploaded realtime. A grassroots initiative to make the GMS a global system. This is not just a pipedream. You can enjoy the data in real time. You can fly through the landscape in real time."

Why do I blog this? so it seems that the industry is now jumping into geowanking applications (with a user generated content twist), nice possibilities here, stuff to keep in eye on.

Vernor Vinge's insights about the future of ubicomp games

An excerpt from Vernor Vinge's talk at the Austin Game Conference (transcribed by Mark Wallace):

If you take together all of the things I have been pushing here [augmented reality through high-resolution HUD, geolocation, smart tags...], there really is a situation where cyberspace has leaked into the real world, in fact the title of the talk was Inside Out, which was intended to convey the notion of what was inside box in all eras up to ours, in this sort of era is outside. (...) Wearables are the interface to it, but the situation with the network as a whole is very interesting, it hasn’t gotten rid of big pipes or server farms, however we would be in a situation where reality has become its own database, in the sense that objects in the outside world, millions of them would know what they are, know where they are, know where their nearest neighbors are, and can talk to their nearest neighbors and by extenstion to anything in the world. (...) This produces the possibility of a form of insight into dealing with the real world once cyberspace has leaked out, once you have this inside out thing.

Then he described the consequences for games and digital entertainment:

There’s a mad rush into embedded processors going forward very rapidly. The localization I’m talking about is much harder. Really good 4k by 4k HUDs, I’m actually somewhat surprised it hasn’t happend already. When those come along, there’s suddenly a whole other set of things you can do. (...) One question is how many alternate realities could simultaneously exist. If you work out the arithmetic and believe the hardware infrastructure scenario I painted, you’re getting 10 to 100 gigabits per second to each person. That means that basically the number of possible alternate realities would be at least as high as the number of people, and could be higher depending on what kind of multitasking people were doing. (...) It’s not so much a question of the place of games in the future world, but a question of whether there’s anything going on besides games. It depends what you mean by game. There are going to be very serious things going on in this world, but the technology behind them might not be distinguishable from games, or only in that with a game you can often turn a bug into not only a feature but a selling point. On the other hand, if you are writing software to land aircraft, mother nature does not accept bugs that are selling points.

So what?:

One of biggest problem with this sort of situation is generating content. Nowadays one thing you hear a fair amount about is getting customers to generate content, which has attained almost faddish levels. In an auidience like this that’s probably not that popular of an idea. On the other hand, when you look at the amount of content that would be necessary to support this, which is essentially all of reality, and you look at the fact that already the largest generators of content are people with home cameras, there is probably something that’s going to be going on with that sort of stuff. It seems to me that we are entering an era various companies have figured out, in which there are ways of spending enormous amounts of money on certain hardware platforms, software, social interactions, and coaxing the creative beast to come out of hiding and do things for you.

See also Mike Kuniavsky's notes on that.

Video Games evolution

The Economist has an article about gaming, showing how "video games are evolving in ways that make them more compelling for adults than teenagers". Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Fun shouldn't be difficult," says George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice-president of marketing and corporate communications. “People are looking for 15 minutes of diversion, often with their family.” It's this realisation that has the veteran video-game firm rethinking both its hardware and software offerings. (...) This method of operation [sony eye toy, sony-nike exercise game] is far less off-putting for casual or non-gamers than mashing the plethora of buttons in just the right order on the game controller. (...) But it's not just the hardware that has driven change; the games themselves are a key element. (...) This “non-game” [Elektroplankton] is as much an electronic musical instrument as a diversion. “Animal Crossing”, also for the DS, presents the player with a cartoon virtual world, and its multi-player elements—the DS has built-in Wi-Fi networking—make it a communication tool rather than a solitary, introverted escape.

Why do I blog this? some good trends are explained here. I like this concept of "non-game games".

Video games and innovation

the age has a good article about John Buchanan (professor from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Centre in Adelaide). Some excerpts I found interesting here:

"The video game industry has reached a point where its success is strangling innovation within the field. Developing games is now a high-risk endeavour. The cost of prototyping becomes expensive because of the technology needed to build it. When interacting with characters in a video game, their behaviour is scripted and hard coded. Programming the behaviour (by) anticipating for all possible scenarios makes it very expensive. The cost of failure is expensive, we need to fail cheaper."

His latest idea to keep costs down is game sketching, through which his team builds tools that are used in puppeteering to build a game idea.

"We use a puppeteer, an actor who sits in front of a computer and reacts in real time to what the guest is doing," he says.

"People with a game idea can send us a script and we can play through the sketch of the game. The guest can interact with the experience of the timing of the events of the game."

Interactive fiction programming language

According to the Wikipedia, Inform is:

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. In 2006, Graham released version 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor ("Inform 7" or "Natural Inform").

Why do I blog this? I wonder what would be the combination of this in a pervasive environment.

HyperScan: Mattel RFID-enabled game console

It seems that Mattel is back in the video game console business with their HyperScan project. It's aimed at tweens (8 to 12 year-old audience) and consists of a console, a controller, a game CD and six collector cards featuring a character or special power. The cards have embedded RFID chips and having new characters (= new cards) allows to get upgrades in the game. According to TG Daily:

"The black and red HyperScan console is about the size of a hard cover book when opened and can be folded up for easy carrying. There are two ports in the front for game controllers and a port in the back connects to a television. Games are started by inserting a game CD and then swiping an RFID-enabled character card over the console. (...) HyperScan is also trying to cash in on the red-hot collectible card phenomenon. Card-based games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh have millions of players and sanction tournaments with millions of dollars in prize money."

Why do I blog this? So there's going to be a new "Touch" habit using this video game console: players will have to swip a card on the console, that's intriguing. Good stuff for Timo's project.

Tips for doing business in SL

(Via), this new on-line magazine: SL Business, it's entirely devoted to how to run a business in Second Life. There are different examples of flourishing activities about clothing, doing music or photography...

BUT IMO, what is strikingly curious (and more interesting to me?) is the magazine itself: - it's published a US army guy in Afghanistan who escape from his reality be doing that and playing SL. - the form of the zine is intriguing with in-game pictures, QR codes here and there... there are different levels of reading the magazines and connecting real + physical places. - the magazine is international (portion are event in japanese) - there's a mix of real world and SL businesses advertisements...

Why do I blog this? this nicely exemplifies the new convergence of old media (magazines...), new media (SL as a social platform) to give tips for what Xavier called a "direct economy".

SNAGU

SNAGU, a project by ITP students (NYU):

snagu is a camera-phone based scavenger hunt with no limits on time, space, or answers. it was created by four students from nyu's itp, pollie barden, cory forsyth, jaki levy, and oren ross, and won the cisco/ mtvu digital incubator grant. it is currently being play-tested before the september national launch. (...) the game is basically a reverse of flickr, rather than tagging a photo, you photo a tag. we will send you your first tag right away, and you just send your photo to tag@snagu.com. you receive the next tag only when you send in your picture or pass on the tag, you control the pace. then you can then go online and vote for your favorite picture. the more people that play, the more fun it becomes, so feel free to send this along to any friends!

They're still developing the game that will be launched in September in the US. They need help for playtesting.

NYT on serious games

In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts:

Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change. (...) “What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,” said Suzanne Seggerman (...) Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,” he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.” (...) This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. (...) But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,” Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.” And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.” (...) “Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,” he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?”

The article is also full of examples of this types of games.

Passively multiplayer gaming

A recent column on Gamasutra is an account of the Mobile Game Conference. There is an intriguing summary of what Justin Hall said and I was interested in this:

His term for the idea is “passively multiplayer gaming” and it basically involves making a persistent MMORPG out of the mundane events of your life. (...) According to Hall, we already spend a healthy chunk of time in contact with our friends and contacts over electronic media: there’s e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, World of Warcraft, and so on. Location-based mobile technology can already tell you where you are.

Now, companies like Finland-based Jaiku are melding the two together, so it’s possible to know where everyone in your social network is at any given time. Throw in some AI, and pretty soon your phone will be taking location-based contextual guesses at their activities--for example, if someone stays in the vicinity of a movie theater for two hours, the system will be pretty sure that they’re watching a movie.

The other piece of Hall’s puzzle is user permission. If you join a passively multiplayer gaming group, you’ll presumably be willing to yield some of your privacy and tell your buddies what you’re up to at any given time, just as we sometimes do in an instant messenger client. After a while, the system will learn your patterns of everyday behavior and become more adept at guessing your activities. So, if you were to tell the system that you’re a smoker, it’ll start to guess that you’re smoking a cigarette when you take a brief trip outside.

At that point, turning your life into one of Hall’s passively multiplayer games is simply a matter of adding game logic. All of your friends will turn into NPC allies, ready to come to your aid in an imaginary game world that parallels your own. Hall’s example at MGC was a simple one--defusing a loose nuke would require timely responses from friends with a certain number of ‘skill points’ in physics--but the possibilities are actually even more endless than they are in real life. Your ‘character’ could gain levels and skill points by checking e-mail, going to saxophone lessons, or writing a column for Gamasutra. Spam e-mails could be turned into enemy fire. Heck, the aforementioned cigarette break could help your friend poison a horde of aliens with toxic chemicals, if you wanted it to!

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see that refreshing new ideas are finally discussed during those mobile game conference. Besides, I really like this idea of “passively multiplayer gaming”. More about it here. The main point is to use the data trails left by our technology usage and feed that back into video games.

Accelerometers and wearable systems

Knight J.F., Bristow, H. W., Anastopoulou, S., Baber, C., Schwirtz, A., & Arvanitis, T. N. (2006). “Uses of Accelerometer Data Collected from a Wearable System.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing”. The paper address the use of accelerometers in wearable systems for diverse applications.

It discusses and demonstrates how body mounted accelerometers can be used in context aware computing systems and for measuring aspects of human performance, which may be used for teaching and demonstrating skill acquisition, coaching sporting activities, sports and human movement research, and teaching subjects such as physics and physical education. (...) In particular, systems for the detection of activity status (including ambulatory mode), assessment of performance (such as match or technique analysis and studying skilled performance)

Why do I blog this? this sort of data might be interesting to use a new category of inputs in video games (to raise your farming activity in MMORPG?).

A battleship on a real world grid

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.