MOBILE CHASE Towards a Framework for Location-Based Gaming Mirko Fetter Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University Weimar, Bauhausstr. 11, Weimar, Germany Markus Etz, Heiko Blechschmied Graphic Information Systems Department, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Fraunhoferstr.5, Darmstadt, Germany Keywords: Location-based Gaming, Pervasive Gaming, Mobile Computing, Computer Supported Cooperative Play. Abstract: Pervasive Gaming and Location-based Games in particular have gained more and more attention recently. Researchers from a variety of fields, media artists, mobile service providers as well as the entertainment industry all seem to have their specific interests in this area. Today a couple of different games exist from basic applications that are already available to the consumer market to bleeding edge research projects. In this paper we introduce a framework for Location-based Gaming that on the one hand helps with the development of market ready games. On the other hand it serves as a toolkit for researchers aiming to rapidly develop Location-based Games, not having to deal with implementation details far away from their research interests in order to focus on their specific research aspects. 1 INTRODUCTION current video and computer games are already selling to a billion dollar market and the analyst Modern information and telecommunication Forrester (Forrester Research Inc., 2000) stated that technologies offer more and more possibilities for Pervasive Gaming will gain a big market share there interaction, entertainment and recreational activities. are also other interested parties besides the game In Pervasive Games the physical world merges with development companies. The mobile service the virtual one and thus offers new adventures and providers might see the possibility that Location- experiences for the players by utilizing these based Games could be a real driver for Location- technologies like mobile devices, tangible user based Services and technologies like 3G. On the interfaces or augmented reality. To increase the level other hand Pervasive Games may help researchers to of immersion these games incorporate the players’ test and analyze the use of a wide spectrum of context by means of e.g. time, place, or personal technologies in game scenarios. The findings and data. things learned could then be transferred to other Location-based Games are one of the many areas ubiquitous computing application fields. where the concepts of Pervasive Gaming come to With the framework presented in this paper we life. Thereby single players or teams perform tasks introduce a tool which can serve as a solid base for in specified scenarios using mobile computers like developers to implement their own gaming ideas. laptops, personal digital assistants or mobile phones Therefore the framework not only takes care of data in combination with wireless communication and management and communication tasks but also location-sensing technologies, having the real world delivers a pattern for the modelling of Location- as their game board. based game content on server- and client-side. There are many reasons to be interested in the The remainder of the paper is organized as current development of Location-based Games. On follows: In section 2 we present work which has the one hand there are clear market issues. As been done on the area of Location-based Games in several fields. In section 3 we outline the basic 98 Fetter M., Etz M. and Blechschmied H. (2007). MOBILE CHASE - Towards a Framework for Location-Based Gaming. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - AS/IE, pages 98-105 DOI: 10.5220/0002077400980105 Copyright c SciTePress MOBILE CHASE - Towards a Framework for Location-Based Gaming requirements of the framework and give a detailed (Flintham et al., 2003) or “Uncle Roy All Around overview of the technical concepts. Further on, in You” (Benford et al., 2004) that come to life on the section 4, we describe “Mobile Chase”, a streets as a sort of artistic event or interactive prototypically-implemented game based on the performance. In contrast to the commercial games framework. In the final section we outline future mentioned before, these events take place for a fixed work and draw conclusions. time only with a limited number of participants. This is somehow reflected in many details of the realisation. Professional actors interact with the 2 RELATED WORK players. In addition, as the devices are provided to the players for the time they play, the technological Pervasive Games can appear in many forms as constraints to cope with are fewer than the constraints commercial game developers have to described by Magerkurth et al. (Magerkurth, Cheok, Mandryk, & Nilsen, 2005), the genres span from take care of, which leads to more sophisticated game smart toys over augmented tabletop games to a form interfaces and a gain in the level of immersion during play time. that he calls Location-Aware Gaming. Thereby the approaches from different genres sometimes are Though Blast Theory collaborates with different mixed in one system and bring up interesting research institutes their interests seem to derive from their artistic background in the first instance. combinations that are hard to differentiate. Location-based Games can be distinguished by Therefore we also want to mention three the fact that they use the position of the player in the contributions made by the research community. In “Pirates!” (Björk, Falk, Hansson, & real world as a major input to the game process. In these games the real world is seen as a game board Ljungstrand, 2001) the homonymous classic computer game from the renowned game designer so they can be considered as the consequent answer Sid Meier was brought to real life. The task of the to ideas like Live Action Role Playing Games - which bring classic Pen and Paper Role Playing player is to “sail” between different locations, representing islands, to search treasures and battle Games to life in events lasting several days - Alternate Reality Games like “The Beast” near players all by using handheld computers, (McGonigal, 2003) - that use the full bandwidth of WLAN and proximity sensors. To prevent a virus from escaping from a campus, modern media and communication technologies to blur the borders between game and reality - and the players of “Epidemic Menace” (Lindt, modern video games. Ohlenburg, Pankoke-Babatz, Prinz, & Ghellal, 2006), a pervasive crossmedia game, are equipped A couple of games and systems have already been developed coming from fields like research, with a variety of mobile devices - some of them media art, or the industry. While last mentioned offering mobile Augmented Reality (AR). Another research project dealing in the area of according to Jegers (Jegers, 2004) only use a small part of what the Pervasive Gaming paradigm offers Location-based Games was the publically funded and are technically reduced to fit today’s user German research project GEIST (Holweg, Schneider, & Göbel, 2004). The goal of the project devices, some of them are already quite successful from a market perspective. For example the Tokyo was to provide pupils with historical information via based game “Mogi, Item hunt” (KDDI, 2003) where means of edutainment. Virtual ghosts from the past gave the pupils tasks by which they could learn facts it is the player’s task to collect virtual items spread over the city and to complete different collections of about the town history. Therefore the children were provided with a wearable computer connected to items. Or the first commercial Location-based Game various positioning devices and a semi-transparent “Botfighters” (Botfighters.com, 2005) developed by “It’s alive” which appeared in 2001 and is about to AR-display on which digital reconstructions of historical buildings were shown on their original be released in version 2.0 where the user plays a robot and has to solve missions hunting other position together with the virtual ghosts. players. Both games can be run on standard mobile As we can see, a lot of work has been put into the field of Location-based Gaming, and a lot of phones supporting J2ME, using Cell-ID based positioning methods. good ideas and systems have been developed. The approach of Blast Theory, a group of However it seems that many implementations are tightly bound to the implemented game concept. London based artists seems in contrast very different. They developed a couple of Location- Therefore our approach is a more generic one, not aware Games like “Can You See Me Now?” focusing on the game idea, but on the underlying 99 GRAPP 2007 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications concepts that are common to every Location-based be played outdoor, etc. Game. In the following we present our proposal for Therefore we defined a J2ME enabled mobile that generic approach. device supporting MIDP 2.0 (SUN Microsystems Inc., 2002a) and CLDC 1.1 (SUN Microsystems Inc., 2003) with network access 3 A FRAMEWORK FOR and some positioning mechanism - which can be at a low level like an address input - as the minimal LOCATION-BASED GAMES specification for a mobile player. Though there already exist some great In this section we describe the requirements we had frameworks, middleware, and platforms for mobile concerning the framework, which will directly lead multiplayer games like Exit Games Neutron 3.5 us to the concepts and implementation details. (Exit Games, 2006), Nokia’s SNAP Mobile (Nokia, 2006), or the proposal of the Mobile Games 3.1 Requirements Interoperability Forum (Mobile Games Interoperability Forum, 2002) , their focus does not As mentioned it was our aim to define a generic lay on supporting Location-based Games. Therefore platform for Location-based Games. Therefore a another requirement while planning the framework major requirement was to define the design of the was to identify those concepts, which are specific to framework as openly as possible in order to allow a Location-based Games, and to concentrate on these.