Sebastian Matyas

Designing location-based mobile games with a purpose: collecting geospatial data with CityExplorer

The games with a purpose paradigm proposed by Luis von Ahn [9] is a new approach for game design where useful but boring tasks, like labeling a random image found in the web, are packed within a game to make them entertaining. But there are not only large numbers of internet users that can be used as voluntary data producers but legions of mobile device owners, too. In this paper we describe the design of a location-based mobile game with a purpose: CityExplorer. The purpose of this game is to produce geospatial data that is useful for non-gaming applications like a location-based service. From the analysis of four use case studies of CityExplorer we report that such a purposeful game is entertaining and can produce rich geospatial data collections.

Wisdom about the crowd: assuring geospatial data quality collected in location-based games

The idea of outsourcing geospatial data creation tasks to the crowd (volunteered geographic information, VGI) has become quite popular in the field of geographic information science (GIScience). As one approach to VGI, location-based games (LBGs) have been shown to be successful in motivating non-expert users to collect and tag geospatial data. However, the central VGI problem of data quality has so far not been solved satisfyingly. Previous studies show that games that reward their players for in- or post-game data reviewing can assure only a validation rate of about 40% of the data. We address this problem with a new LBG design pattern, based on game rules that encourage players to take the decisions of others into account while making their data collecting decisions. We empirically evaluate the new pattern by comparing the positional accuracy of data collected with two different rule sets for the LBG GeoSnake. Our pattern is shown to result in a significant accuracy improvement.

Geogames: a conceptual framework and tool for the design of location-based games from classic board games

Location-based games introduce an element that is missing in interactive console games: movements of players involving locomotion and thereby the physical effort characteristic of any sportive activity. The paper explores how to design location-based games combining locomotion with strategic reasoning by using classical board games as templates. It is shown that the straightforward approach to “spatialize” such games fails. A generic approach to spatialization is presented and described within a conceptual framework that defines a large class of geogames. The framework is complemented by a software tool allowing the game designer to find the critical parameter values which determine the games balance of reasoning skills and motoric skills. In order to illustrate the design method, a location-based version of the game TicTacToe is defined and analyzed.

Playing on a line: location-based games for linear trips

Most location-based games are designed for players who move freely around a geographic game board such as a city centre or acampus. By contrast, we discuss design issues for location-based games played when traveling from A to B on a predefined route, e.g. when following a biking trail along a river. We present the results of a simulation study that compares different alternatives of adopting a two-dimensional location-based game to a linear feature. As our running example for a linear location-based game, we use a geographic version of the board game Alak, the most popular linear game from the family of Go games.

Building geospatial data collections with location-based games

The traditional, expert-based process of knowledge acquisition is known to be both slow and costly. With the advent of theWeb 2.0, community-based approaches have appeared. These promise a similar or even higher level of information quantity by using the collaborative work of voluntary contributors. Yet, the community-driven approach yields new problems on its own, most prominently contributor motivation and data quality. Our former work [1] has shown, that the issue of contributor motivation can be solved by embedding the data collection activity into a gaming scenario. Additionally, good games are designed to be replayable and thus well suited to generate redundant datasets. In this paper we propose semantic view area clustering as a novel approach to aggregate semantically tagged objects to achieve a higher overall data quality. We also introduce the concept of semantic barriers as a method to account for interaction betwen spatial and semantic data. We also successfully evaluate our algorithm against a traditional clustering method.

Geogames – Ortsbezogene Spiele als neue Form des Edutainment (Geogames – Location-based Games as a Novel Type of Edutainment)

Ortsbezogene Spiele nutzen die durch Lokalisierungstechnologien wie GPS aufgezeichnete Fortbewegung der Spieler als zentrale Form der Interaktion mit der auf mobilen Endgeräten implementierten Spiellogik. Dieser Artikel beschreibt den Geogames-Ansatz, der es ermöglicht, strategische Elemente aus herkömmlichen Brettspielen mit ortsbezogenen Spielkonzepten zu kombinieren. Ein Beispiel ist das Spiel GeoTicTacToe. Wir zeigen, dass bei jedem Geogame die Spielereignisse durch Auszeiten synchronisiert werden müssen. Diese Auszeiten eignen sich hervorragend zur Einbettung von Edutainmentinhalten. Anhand eines Testspiels wird vorgeführt, wie der Geogame-Ansatz bei Vermittlung des UNESCO-Weltkulturerbegedankens in der Altstadt von Bamberg umgesetzt wurde. Location-based games use localization technology like GPS and integrate the locomotion of their players as an important means of interaction between the user and the game. This article describes the geogames approach aimed at combining strategic elements taken from classic board games with location-based game concepts. To keep Geogames (like e.g. GeoTicTacToe) balanced between strategic thinking and sportive activity a spatio-temporal synchronization mechanism becomes necessary which integrates waiting times into the rules of the game. Test games conducted in the city of Bamberg with the aim to communicate the UNESCO world heritage idea prove that an integration of edutainment content into these waiting times does not reduce the fun of the game.