Virtual/Physical Locations
My parents bought my first video game system, an original Nintendo, over twenty years ago. I’ve been a passionate gamer ever since.
As you can imagine, that means I’ve seen a thing or two in the gaming culture. I’ve played FPS, RPG, RTS, action, adventure, sports, and MMOPRGs. I’ve spent a sizable amount of time in almost all the available genres and I’m ready to try something new.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I recently got an iPhone. Gaming has exploded on the device – with over a billion applications downloaded for the phone in the last nine months, over 35% of them were games. People like having games in their pockets and the iPhone offers unparalleled gaming performance, especially compared to the previous generation of mobile games.
But the iPhone is a gaming platform that hasn’t been seen before. Mobile gaming is nothing new – the Nintendo Gameboy came out in 1989, and it wasn’t the first mobile platform.
However, the integration of a true gaming platform with the capabilities of a phone is unique, at least for the quality of the gaming experience offered. For all intents and purposes, the iPhone is a new system. And new systems demand new gameplay mechanics are explored.
For a long time I’ve been a fan of the MMORPG genre, and the iPhone offers several MMO-type games, especially those in the facebook, social-networking style. However, what I’ve yet to see is a game that takes advantage of the iPhone’s location services, the GPS-like capability of the phone. Tons of applications use it, but no games, as far as I’ve seen.
Why not? Motion sensing is all the rage on the consoles – the Wii popularized it, but now Microsoft and Sony are jumping on the bandwagon. But the iPhone, because it’s portable, offers something more. And I want those offerings taken advantage of.
I want to play an MMO that knows where I am and links my physical location to a virtual location. I want to create a game that gives the planet Earth a virtual overlay, intractable via a mobile (read: the iPhone) interface.
I want to bring my character my buddy’s house by carrying it there in my pocket. I want a game directly tied to physical location. If I want to bring my character to a deep dark dungeon – I have to physically go there, even though a deep dark dungeon in the virtual world could easily correspond to my local physical Starbucks.
Sure, it seems like a daunting task. To cover over the world with a virtual overlay, user created content is vital, simply because the labor it would take for a dedicated production team to create a world would be unreachable. However, as long as the tools are easy, users will use them. If nothing else, Second Life proved that.
I want a game interface that encourages physical interaction. I have many local gaming friends and we interact nightly, but it’s all online. I want to be able to open up a toolset on my PC, create a new adventure for our characters to explore, link the virtual location to a local park or coffee shop, and meet them all there to play. I want physical, social interaction back as a gamer. More than that, I want the places created and adventures made to remain permanent, so others, people I don’t know and will probably never meet, can access the content I’ve created if they go to the physical place that’s tied to the virtual content.
I like to travel. I live in Iowa, but it’s not uncommon for me to take a road trip up to Maine, or down to New Orleans, or even overseas. When I travel, I’d like to bring my character with me. How awesome would it be to go to Chicago, get dragged to yet another trip to the Chicago aquarium by my girlfriend, and find out that some Windy-City based user or gaming group had overlaid the Chicago Aquarium with an awesome ingame location or adventure? How cool would it be to go to my local Starbucks to buy a coffee and end up spending a few hours exploring a virtual world while sipping my java?
The locations in the virtual world should be tied to GPS, not local networks, so as long as cellphone (3G, or AT&T’s long overdue 7.2M network) is available, the game would be playable. Players could create a virtual location or adventure in the middle of a field if they so desired.
Content creators (users) could tie achievements to certain locations, or give in game items for explored content. Imagine an achievement for visiting all 50 state capitals in the United States, or for visiting Niagara Falls and taking a picture. Imagine visiting a certain small town burger joint as you were passing through town and finding an adventure that leveled up your character or gave you a sweet new item. That would be kickass.
But this virtual overlay wouldn’t just have to be for gaming. Businesses could use it to interact with customers. Your character or avatar is in Walmart (because you’re there with your phone)? How about a virtual store? Why go to the cash register when you can just buy the products in your shopping cart right on your phone and carry them out of the store? And so on, the possibilities are endless. Of course, since the virtual real estate is finite, cyber-squatting could be an issue, but these are things for a legal department to worry about.
Imagine the possibilities for attracting customers to your physical business, by offering them a virtual reason to do so. People hanging out in a coffee shop are more likely to buy more coffee if you can get them to hang out for a few hours. How about offering players a neat adventure, something constantly updated so they have a reason to come back more often, or on a regular basis? Sound good?
It sure does. If I had the resources to create something like that, I’d do it, and I’d do it now (Ahem, I’ll be happy to help design it, hint, hint). The beauty of this system is it gets us up off the couch, interacting again with the world around us. Mobile is the future, baby.
Of course, there is already talk about things like this. The term geo-surfing is thrown around occasionally, used to describe local advertising and service network nodes that are rooted in a physical location. But a uniform, easy to navigate network is needed, based off the cellular data networks, not local wireless. It must support user created content.
So, alright, let’s go. Who’s making this? Hurry up, you slowpokes. I wanna play.
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I actually have a game like this already in the planning stages. If you are interested in working on it, shoot me an email.
Interested aspirants who would like to learn iphone game development can check out the online course offered at edumobile.org
I’ve been doing research in this area of games development for the past year and the one thing that the iPhone has lacked until the new 3GS came out was the digital compass. Without that, the phone could tell which way is up but couldn’t tell which direction you were pointing it. This made augmented reality apps as they’re called, impossible to create to the standards that people wanted. With the new phones coming out this next week and their 2x speed boost and 4x graphical boost in addition to the digital compass, the whole field will change. I applaud you for seeing where games will be going soon and humbly suggest that while an RPG would be feasible, looking towards something in the live action FPS genre would be more likely for the first few titles. I don’t have any inside information to support this claim but creating a bunch of independent localized arenas for various games requires a whole lot less work than creating localized arenas for people to play in AND organizing them into a cohesive whole for an RPG.
I’m thinking that we’ll first start to see kick-the-can/Capture-the-flag type games where people try to sneak around and (replace with appropriate metaphor here,) take pictures of one another. After those, we’ll likely see simple maps built for counter-strike type games that tie to local parks (GPS is a lot more accurate outside and even there has some locations that can achieve more accuracy than others.) Once the competitive and co-op shooters are dealt with, *then* I think we’ll start to see some of the RPG style action. I’ve been telling people for years how happy it would make me to see the antics required of an augmented reality raid group to kill some boss in the current MMORPG. I’m imagining 20 people doing complex running patterns, phone pointing, and button smashing all the while yelling directions and warning at one another… fun stuff to watch
Oh yeah, and just as a parting thought… the G1 Androids have had digital compasses since their inception yet nobody has made a truly earth-shattering game on that platform. I hope that with enough people like you prodding developers, we’ll see some motion on the iPhone front.
I am making a first iteration of this. It is almost done. I am raising money to finish it right but it is currently in feature complete bug squashing phase. Ok, so it is not the MMO that you are talking about but few first iterations will be what you are looking for. It is a much much much simpler concept. Also, sorry to say, but first release will be Android. Making the iPhone port is priority one with my raised funds though. I have focused on the game instead of the web page, but I have people working on that now. I would love to let you know when I can show you more information.
This might interest you: http://www.pervasive-gaming.org/
Did you mean something like this??
http://www.mscapers.com/
Nice idea, unfortunately not realistic. You apparently do not know how GPS works. First, it won’t work in building unless you’re close to a window and it just happens to like you. (It sounds like you think it’s tied to 3G or GSM. It’s not at all, but I could be interpreting you wrong based on your wording in a couple sentences here.) Second, it will drain your iPhone’s battery in about 30-60 minutes. Maybe more if it’s not doing anything else, like checking in with cell towers and ready to receive calls/texts. Third, the demographic for such a massive undertaking isn’t large enough to make it worth while. Last, and I think almost as important, is that even in your metaphor, it breaks down when you get to “the dungeon” or something. You want to explore the dungeon, but your local starbucks has a room roughly the size of the bathroom at the mall, so it’s going to be a quick exploration. If you can explore the dungeon freely once you get there, then the game ISN’T tied to physical location, it just requires you go somewhere in order to play the content that has nothing to do with where you are, just what users put in the box at where you are.
At that point, the game mechanic is no longer a mechanic, it’s a gimmick. Gimmick games are great for dying in obscurity and proving to industry execs that such-and-such mechanic does not work. Earliest examples were the Power Glove, which wasn’t a big seller, and hasn’t been tried even half as seriously since.
This game is not a cell phone app, and it’s not likely to prove fruitful for a company since the demographic of MMO players does not come close to being equal in size to the demographic of people that want to go places while playing MMOs. Niche, I believe is the term.
Checkout “Ghosts AR” for android. It’s almost you are talking about.
Parallel Kingdom is doing something pretty similar to what your looking for.
http://www.parallelkingdom.com
An full real-time multiplayer RPG game that is location based.
Geocaching is probably the closest concept that is active today and has been for 9 years. New games created for this genre may take elements from existing games but my guess is, like geocaching, you’ll see more game-like experiences that may not fit in the normal console game stereotype.
Parallel Kingdom is exactly what you’re looking for.
It is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Google Android. It was released late 2008 and is already in its second version. It works with Google Maps and the phone’s GPS location to locate your character on a real map. It is real-time and MMO. After your character is located using your GPS, you get a radius of about a mile or so to move around in, build stuff, attack stuff, and interact with other players without having to physically move. It is also one of the first games to have a global chat function where you can interact with all the other players currently playing.
You can also build flags and houses to claim territory and visit other players anywhere in the world allowing you to travel in the game independent from your physical location. This helps players interact that might not be near a lot of other GPS phone users. This travel aspect and the “radius of movement” feature also help alleviate those concerned with safety and stalker-type issues.
Good stuff! It’ll totally work — that and more. In ten years we’ll have wonders of entertainment that no one has even thought up.
On some level, what you are describing is a suped-up Tomagachi.
I utterly fail to see the appeal of this. When I want physical social interaction along with online gaming, we meet up at someone’s house. Voice quality is great, and we burn no gas moving back and forth between game areas. The big innovation of online games for me has been being able to find players who share my interests; if they don’t happen to live in my home town, or my time zone, or my hemisphere, that’s not necessarily an impediment.
Welcome to 2003.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/04/63011?currentPage=all
I am very surprised that this has not become a much bigger market as of yet. I was excited about this concept 5 years ago.
Sadly mscape can’t handle this kind of thing. It’s basically just a glorified website with its own funky programming language that adds two events to the standard website model: GPSEntersRectangle and GPSLeavesRectangle. A nice try but without any sort of real graphics capability, it’ll never live up to the claims of its advertisement videos
I’d disagree, having people explore the real world as part of their game and be in the same physical space as the rest of the people playing the game could have real draw. If I ‘died’ in some dungeon and had to wait for a respawn, it’d be pretty great to have others there two in the same boat to chat with.
Also, you apparently don’t have an iPhone or haven’t explored the GPS functionality on it… I’ve wandered around cities for multiple hours navigating with the mapping apps watching my little GPS dot bounce around. I assure you, this works.
I gave this game a try last night. And although it looks interesting, I see it more as a real world “Risk” (territory capture, building, attacking) than anything else. Most certainly, it does not support user created content, which is probably the most important thing I’d like to see, past the physical/virtual ties.
Paeallell Kingdom would be pretty much the same game if it used a black background instead of one based on google maps. I respect what it want to do, and the more talk in this mechanic the better, but it’s nothing close to what I had in mind. My fault for explaining it poorly, I guess.
I checked out a geo catching website. It’s not what I’m looking for in my post above, but it still looks kinda fun. Apparently there are a bunch of geocaches just down the street from me, so I plan to take my phone out this weekend and see if I can find some.
Thanks for letting me know about this.
On some level, gentle spring rain is the same thing as a class 5 hurricane.
The appeal, at least for me, is to get my local friends (who I game with online) back into physical social interaction. I understand that relying on a game to do this, instead of just cajoling them to get the hell off of their machines, is silly, but hey, there it is.
Yeah. This post (and it’s responses) have enlightened me that there are a bunch of projects similar to this thing I’d like to play, but nothing widely accepted or user created. Maybe people don’t want it at all, or maybe none of these projects is really polished enough for greater acceptance.
I don’t have an android phone, so I can’t check it out directly, but the concept does look pretty cool, if a bit limited. But simpler is better, at least for wider acceptance, I guess.
This was interesting as hell. It’s sad that the project is now closed. Still, many of the links from the page are still active projects and blogs. I’ll be back to check this site out more once I have the time. It’s not like what I want in my post above, but it’s still some interesting stuff.
I look forward to hearing more.
If it’s worth the ten bucks to you, the official Groundspeak Geocaching app is very nice. I don’t even take my “real” GPS devices out caching anymore. (They’re more precise, for whatever reason, but the iPhone GPS and the app are just so nice rolled together.)
Looking more at your comments to others it seems like I am not going to be delivering what you want most. This is probably a difference of opinion, but I immediately shy away from games that rely heavily on user created content. User persistent content would be interesting, but a majority of user created content I find to be a waste of time.
The route I would take it is more of a Diablo style dungeon building algorithm. The random generation would be necessary to create all the playable content in the first place. Everything could be static. Or, possibly the dungeon could be dynamic but it changes based on user experience. Eliminate areas where people never go, expand walls into areas that people seem to approach expecting to be able to explore.
So I say you can certainly get your users to help craft the world, but I don’t think they should be the ones writing the content.
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