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Using Wireless Signals in Games
MetaByte writes "A swiss group has created a game for the Nintendo DS that utilizes the surrounding WiFi transmissions to set up the game world. By moving through the city, the game changes. Another game for the Nintendo DS creates an audible city from the wlan-waves. The Austrian artist Gordan Savicic takes the wlan landscape to a painful level. The density of the waves and strength of the encryption cause servos to tighten a corset. Moving lets you feel being disclosed of encrypted digital worlds that turns into useless electrosmog."
"Moving lets you feel being disclosed of encrypted digital worlds that turns into useless electrosmog."
Double You Tee Eff?
Try:
10 RANDOMIZE TIMER
I don't get what's so cool about using wifi for your random seeds, instead of anything else.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
The cool comes from the potential to make it less random. For example, taking the results of a portscan and feeding that into an enemy generator - if there's a lot of AIM traffic, you'd be able to deduce this from the fact that you're fighting a lot of trolls... if more people are using Yahoo IM, you'd run into more Orcs, etceteras. I probably misspoke when I said random "seed" - the attraction with something like this is using the traffic to generate enough variation in the game environment to make each play experience different.
I really don't see the point. What good is it to integrate data into your game that has no relation what so ever with your game? The only good use I can think of would be Dr. Kawashima making some witty comments when you are in a Wifi flooded area, but enemy formation and such? What would be the point in connecting that with random Wifi data?
Like Solios said, the point is to have less randomness, not more. The point is to make the game respond to the physical environment in which the gamer exists, unlike most games which are their own little universe. Mobile gaming platforms allow us to move our games through cities and public spaces, which are awash with life. Wireless network traffic is just one type of information with which a game designer can make the game dynamic to the gamer's surroundings, but it has the neat property that the necessary hardware is already available.
There was a game years back which used your computer's directory structure to generate game maps. I think the idea of this game was you were fighting viruses within your own computer or something like that, but it's unimportant. The point was that the game design was dynamic to factors beyond the 'game world'.
You are listening, but you're not hearing. That's the difference (obscure reference : white people can listen to Jimmy Hendrix, but they aren't hearing Jimmy.)
This is next-generation, it's evolution towards an integration of extended perception into an environment most people are only vaguely aware exists. You can see a rainbow right now, red orange yellow green blue purple - guess what, there are other colors of light on either edge that you don't know exist, because you can't see them and never thought to look for them - ultraviolet and infrared. They're there, and nobody knows it. The world through which you walk is CHOCK FULL of new and old information that wasn't even there (or just couldn't be seen) four decades ago, telling you dozens of things about the world you live in - but you don't even know they are there. Your exact location on the planet, plus or minus three meters, is something you can tell (with help of a GPS) just by seeing the relative strengths electromagnetic signals from three satellites in the sky. Also the speed and direction you are traveling. Your relative distance to a motion sensing device and the nature of that device (door that automagically opens when people walk up indicates commercial building, intermittent Ka band that increases in strength when you approach an overpass or large street sign but goes away when you pass it indicates a cop car behind you, etc.) Open / closed wifi stations. You can tell whether or not a vehicle is running by looking at a heat signature from hundreds of feet away using thermal imaging.
The DS implementation is simply proof of concept of a much larger picture, opening the door to people seeing into light spectrums that were previously closed.
You're listening to the story, and you don't see the benefit. When this makes sense to you - then you're hearing the story.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer