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Defining an Interactive Physical MMO For the iPhone
already-living-in-a-virtual-world writes "On his blog, mispeled writes about a new type of game he'd like to see for the iPhone. It's interesting stuff: '... 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 that new gameplay mechanics be 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, interactable via a mobile (read: the iPhone) interface.'"
I find this the most obscene idea you could imagine. Play a game based on where my phone tells you I'm located? Hell no. I do not want that kind of invasion of privacy at all. In fact, given the potential fo abuse, I'd prefer it to be legally banned.
There are enough crazy people doing criminal things with the games we have. Do I want a physical location to be intrinsic to the game? Nope. Same reason I don't post any details of where I live in the games I do play, or on the message boards. Is that paranoid of me? Perhaps, but as long as the number of people who get injured and killed from conflicts with others remains non-zero, I'm going to stay that way.
And yes, that's why I'm an anonymous coward too. Sure, I suppose somebody at Slashdot's HQ could track me down, but that risk is minimal compared to me shouting it out.
*knock knock* Excuse me sir. Please don't mind the 29 other people behind me. They're in my raiding party. It would seem that our MMORPG has placed a boss mob in what I can only assume might be your living room. Would you mind terribly if we played through? Also, we're going to be farming this boss mob until our entire guild is outfitted properly. Can we put you down for the same time every Thursday?
Don't blab about it here. Build it and make millions. Before I do.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I have seen what can happen to people that play MMORPGs. It's not natural. They drink crazy amounts of nasty beer and press the same key combo for 12 hours non stop. If these people are allowed to take this with them where ever they go, their lives will go from being 90% useless to 100% useless. SiteList.ca
I've been thinking a lot about this type of game concept as well. Similar stuff is dealt with in William Gibson's book, Pattern Recognition (but in the book, it's more art than gaming). Still it is such a cool, relatively untapped "genre".
When I was a kid in the early 80's, there were a few role playing games, such as one called "Killer", where you'd get assignments on paper, then go out into your neighborhood and try to assassinate your friends with squirt guns based on your objectives. Super fun game, and very tense. Can you imagine people these days with all the heightened paranoia about guns allowing their kids to do this now? Probably not. Anyway, I side-tracked there. Would be wild to see gaming like this take off.
And SF NY and a few other places will have a METRIC TONNE of cool things, and everywhere else will be a dearth of nothing to do because no self respecting geek seems to believe anywhere might actually exist.
Sure, maybe the idea sounds fun in theory - but a MMORPG full of virtualized parents' basements would get pretty repetitive after a short while, I'd think.
#DeleteChrome
Make it use Google Earth somehow.. I can see it now. Johnny's walking down the street staring blankly at his iphone.. *wham!* "OMG.. WTF!! That signpost wasn't in the game a second ago!"
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Such a game already exists, to an extent. It's called Underworld: Sweet Deal. Find it in the App Store - it's free to play. A bit dead ended, but a great first effort. Think Drug Wars...with candy.
They could incorporate the phone feature into the game and make it so you have to talk to other people and build relationships. As you advance further along in the game, you must choose a career path. You will randomly get calls from your boss asking you to come in early or on your day off. If you choose not to follow the path, you end up 30 years old living in your mom's basement and have to put up with her constant nagging about how you never help out around the house or pay for your share of the phone bill.
That's crazy. I totally help out around the house. Who do you think set up the home network?
on my cybersex partners, trust me, none of them want the introduction of a real-life underlay!
Sounds like you're describing Parallel Kingdom. It is an MMORPG that uses the iPhone's GPS/location services to place the virtual world on top of the real world. There is an version Android too.
Hmm wasn't this the same forum that trashed virtual decatur? A project that would have made a game like this the next logical step? But what do I know?
Oh, hey. Yeah.
*leans away from iPhone displaying World of GPSCraft screen*
Yeah, I'm playing World of GPSCraft too. Huh? What? Sorry, I couldn't quite hear you. Oh, those 50 nervous sweating guys around me? Yeah, we're a raid. You want to join? Uh, well, ok. I guess there's always room for one more. Yeah, I know it kind of smells. They're too afraid to touch me, though, and it's easy to take down elites. So yeah, don't touch me.
*raid targets bus*
*nerds cluster around it and dissolve it with their grease*
Go play nethack at midnight. Or during a full moon. Or on Friday the 13th.
It sounds like it could be the best version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego ever
Play a game based on where my phone tells you I'm located? Hell no. I do not want that kind of invasion of privacy at all.
It's not an "invasion of privacy" if you are running the game for that explicit purpose!!
After all, you have to be running the game up to keep updating your location - if you tire of playing you shut it down.
I'm not sure where privacy enters into the equation since you personally chose in this instance to make your location known to a specific set of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny, the same thing pretty much was featured in a Numb3rs episode in season 4 (Episode 7 Primacy). Although the physical aspect of the game was more like an additional layer added on top of a normal MMO to get special bonuses or something like that.
GPS Mission can be played with iPhone too, and Players are able to design the Missions. No Multiplayer as of now, though.
For those who prefer something a little... faster than an MMO
The Bible: Historically verifiable fact from an observers point of view
You can dream all you want but until the iPhone supports multitasking and has a decent battery life no-one will be doing anything worthwhile on it (apart from making fart sounds).
Why not port your idea to Nokia's platform? True multitasking, better battery life, 3G/wifi/hsdpa, native SDK.
I'm still waiting for my meatspace deathmatches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNuRQmvykwk
But this kind of game already exists:
http://www.parallelkingdom.com/home.shtml
for the Iphone and Android...and it's even free...
I was thinking along the same lines a few weeks back after seeing a Samsung Omnia HD mobile phone. You could have a virtual world overlapping the real one and your mobile phone becomes a window that allows one to see this virtual overlapping world. You could have virtual treasure hunts with cute virtual avatars based around a city that you can search out and ask questions and find virtual treasure like mobile phone credits etc. Everything needed is now in a mobile phone ie camera (to assist in virtual/real world overlay alignment), gps, big colour screen, motion detection. Even creepier you can have things like virtual ghosts and vampires and monsters (I can imagine the goths drooling as I type) there are no limits to what you can overlap our real world with.
Well, I guess the discussion also applies to all other mobiles with similar capabilites, e.g. the G1, most new blackberries, etc.
Howver, the iPhone was made a proxy for a new kind of mobile because it was one of the first and certainly the most popular of them. Unless we come up with a snazzy term for these kinds of mobiles, I guess we have to live with that...
> It sounds like it could be the best version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego ever
Not to mention the most expensive one ever! :(
Obviously, there is one IP that springs to mind:
Highlander. You get a notice when you are in the area with another immortal. Then you battle.
Now we just need holographic claymores to emit from the device... Is there an app for that?
Didn't anyone play TAG (The Assassination Game) as a kid? The iPhone knows where you are and which direction the phone is pointing, so you could theoretically use it as a "gun". Or to drop off a "bomb" on a timer. Another player could detect the bomb if they're in the area and run a scan with their phone.
No more peanut butter on the underside of a car handle to indicate you just got blown up.
I think this could be awesome.
YOU may not be able to envision a game that is able to sidestep these privacy concerns while being enjoyable, but that doesn't mean the idea does not exist.
I for one would love to play a game that combines the real-world aspects of, say, geocaching, with some sort of video game aspect. Maybe some sort of collaborative treasure hunt where you play a game but have to actually get out of your house to do it.
I'm sure something like this exists but I haven't looked too hard for it. The main problem with a concept like this is that it's hard to make it globally playable, keep privacy concerns in mind, and enjoyable as a game. However, just because you can't envision such a scenario, there's no need for you to decide that it's a bad idea.
www.clarke.ca
Go to the app store, and check for Sweet Deals.. You go around buying and selling candy via gps.. Im jailbroken and there is a skin that turns it into Drug Lords, and I go around buying and selling drugs.
Basically, they set up in major cities, you rent a couple of phones from them for your group and go on an adventure. You meet up with other NPCs (yes, real live people who are employees of Urban) and they provide clues or distractions or whatever. Not a real MMORPG but certainly different from most out there.
I've not had a chance to play but I did a tiny part of the iPhone coding for them, but I do not have a financial interest in them.
Something like this??
http://www.mscapers.com/
There's an iPhone game for every major TV/Movie/etc release nowadays- including one for the Sarah Conner Cronicles, in which players from PCs and web browers (the machines) place traps and ambushes for the iPhone players (the resistance).
It seemed like a cool idea, except for the broadcasting my location all the time. That's kinda stalker-rific.
http://terminatorambush.com/
There is plenty of potential for games based on GPS. Personally, my dream game has been along a little different tack. Given that most of the world's land mass is mapped out and available in fairly high definition bird eye view/satellite imagery, especially populated ones, I'd like to see games based on real-life imagery like this. IE. A Need For Speed where you can drive in any major city in the world - just have an AI system that determines what parts of a city from multiple photograph are drivable. An even more futuristic possibility is a similar game that draws its maps from live satellite and camera feeds. Rush hour in NYC? its rush hour in the game too... wouldn't that make for a very interesting Grand Theft Auto?
And new systems demand new gameplay mechanics are explored.
Which did you mean:
I.e. are you exploring the mechanics or the systems?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Going outside.... check
Playing with other humans... check
Why do you need a phone for this? Why not just LARP or play K.A.O.S.?
Ok, a phone could be part of the game, sure, even have helper applications on it. But once you add, "location based," and "play with other humans" there really isn't much reason for the RPG part to be electronics based...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Check out new "Ghosts AR" game for android. It's still requires some fixes but in general game idea is very similar to.
also, Gibson's latest featured some of this sort of thing iirc.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
just like i willfully put internet exploder on my windows box?
which isn't to say i'm totally against the idea, but given the typical care marketers (especially telco ones) put into their distribution deals i'm a bit skeptical it'll all be roses.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I've been working on building this kind of game for years and it's actually pretty cool. It allows you to interact with your environment based on location and special objects and nearby players. Instead of going 3D the game is based on a communicator concept similar to Carmen San Diego and you're given clues to complete quests before other players can. Sometimes you work with other players and sometimes against and sometimes in teams.
Who cares if someone knows where you're at? When you walk through the supermarket everyone you see knows where you are at but it's hardly an issue.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
i just imagine.. should i end up on the microsoft campus, would that put me in the hell level of the game on the iPhone?
Hey.. you can come up with a generic term that we will all adopt.. like.. what about.. Walkman?
I actually very recently discussed this idea with a friend of mine, and the same concerns came up. Privacy is definitely an issue, but I don't think it's very difficult to protect. The game could allow you to interact with other people that are nearby without telling you their location, or even how far away from you they are, similar to the way that on-line matchmaking works (but with a much smaller range). None of that information needs to be available to the players. There's still privacy and security concerns, but I'm hoping, along with the OP, that these games get made. If they don't, well, that's why I'm a game developer as well as a player.
Surrealism: You have two giraffes. The government pays you to take harmonica lessons.
Virtual Light type geohacking would need a device that was aware of it's physical orientation, not just it's location. You would, in effect, need a three dimensionally operational compass, not just an accelerometer. Given the vagries of GPS, you'd also need differential lock-in. I suppose you might be able to do that with bluetooth, if you had smarter hardware giving the differential back to you from you talking to it, to give the offset bias, rather than trying to do the processing on the phone itself, without the necessary timing hooks and resolution in the software stack there (remember, you are being isolated from the hardware by SDKs).
I'm not sure you'll be seeing something like Tonchidot's demo http://www.intomobile.com/2008/09/17/tonchidots-sekai-camera-iphone-application-augmented-reality-coming-to-iphone.html in real life any time soon.
-- Terry
So the blogger is suggesting Dennou Coil or Real.
I know the OP originally was talking about slightly different technologies, but given what AR has done for the common figurine, imagine the applications it could serve on your iPhone. Touch screen + Accelerometer + Camera + Augmented reality system.... It could easily pull off the kinds of things Dennou Coil had suggested. Personally, I think that's the best approach.
I developed the prototype "Ayle" (www.ayle.fr)
A MMORPG would be really hard to develop because besides iPhone and the appstore there is no way to get money back.
And you can't sell account so easily.
In fact, every little MMORPG try like Parallel Kingdom are only a "try".
I bet this will never work. Mobiles need more time to get mature and be able to offer such game.