Mogi Location-Based Mobile Gaming Hits Japan

Thanks to TheFeature for its article discussing the popular Japanese mobile phone game Mogi, a title which "uses both the position of players in the landscape, and the landscape itself to generate play." The French developers of Mogi at Newt Games explain: "We used the map to give [virtual] creatures some interesting behavior. Some creatures only hunt at night. Some hang around close to parks", thus: "If a player wants to find that [in-game] creature, they'll have to travel near a park [playing Mogi on their mobile phone] in the evening hours." A keen Tokyo-based player of the game also explains why he enjoys it: "All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me."

Comments

Re:Take an object, leave an object

[sould]

Did you look at the website?

This game is nothing like geocaching.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Pokemon Crystal in Japan had a cellphone play feature. It was short-lived, but innovative at the time.

Nintendo now have kiosks where gamers can play wirelessly against each other.

Re:how does it work?

[Bushcat]

The phones have GPS. The actual positional calculation is offloaded to the network. But non-GPS phones have pretty good accuracy in Japan due to the cell density, anyway.

I did some work on a similar type of game last year, and our main concern was whether we actually wanted people to physically meet each other, so we had virtual object layers superimposed on the city, where each player saw their own personalized layer: two people could be racing towards an object, but each saw the object in a different location.