Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
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?
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.