Technical Design Issues of Mobile, Collaborative and Locative Game

Mobile Learning with a Mobile Game: Design and Motivational Effects by Gerhard Schwabe, Christoph Göth at the University of Zürich, covers many technical design issues of mobile, locative and collaborative gaming I can relate to my experience with CatchBob!: Accuracy of positioning, play on the move, offline areas and response time and interface design.

Accuracy of Positioning
As soon as the players had to know the exact position of an object, the accuracy was not sufficient. They had to search in up to three rooms to find the hidden PDA in the first trial and the participants reported difficulties catching and solving location dependent tasks in our second trial. In the second trial, the law accuracy of the location information was reported as the single most important negative aspect. There were two parts to this problem: the low precision of the location information and the representation of this low precision on screen.
Play on the move
The size of the maps does not appear to be a major problem as they covered half the PDA screen and the participants did not have problems reading when standing. Rather, they did not succeed to synchronize their heads to the movemements of the device in the hand. Furthermore the cognitive load of translating an abstract two-dimensional map to into a trhee-dimensional building was high.
Offline areas and response time
Frequent updating of position is one most important requirements of mobile games. The players waht a near real-time reaction of the client. This means, the mobile game has to have both a good caching algorithm, and an efficient data transmission strategy.
Interface design
Observatin of the players showed that navigation with the drop-down menu and using the pen of the PDA was not really intuitive. The use of the PDA was much more like the use of an “automat”.

They discussus the effects of their design using the six structural elements that charecterise games: 1) rules, 2) goald and objectives, 3) outcome and feedback whci measure theh progress against tht goals, 4) conflicts, competition, challenge and opposition, 5) interaction, that is the social apsect in the game and 6) the representation or story exaggerating interesting aspects of reality.

Designing Mobile Games

I stumbled on two powerpoints on Designing Mobile Games, one by Greg Costikyan and the other by David MacQueen that give tips on mobile games design without forgetting the technical constraints . A few bullets I found compealing:

• Game design has two main components: UI specification and gameplay algorithm specifications
• Game Design is about action. Not necessarily fast action, but the player takes actions to affect the game state
• Media assets are the “nounsâ€? of the game—allowable actions are the “verbsâ€?
• UI allows you to trigger the verbs. In a mobile game, ideally 1 key = 1 verb
• Doom has only 8 (left, right, ahead, back, jump, shoot, switch weapons, pick up)
• Types of Challenges are: physical, mental, and oppenents
• Categories of pleasure: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, masochism.
• Constraints do not limit creativity; they spur it
• Multiplayer games differ: players provide the challenge, replayability is vital, handling player drops gracefully, player matching, short play sessions
• Approaches in dealing with latency: Turn-based games (round robin or simultaneous movement), act-whenever, slow update games, shared solitaire games, mask latency with game fantasy, untie game outcomes from specific play configuration

The Six Degrees of Duncan Watts at TAICON

Duncan Watts, the writer of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” gave a talk at a TAICON event. His talk sketches out the scholarly history of the small world problem (alongside its meteoric rise in popular culture), from its origins in sociology up to the recent explosion of work in physics and mathematics that uses it as a central reference point. The lecture also discusses the relevance of the “six degreesâ€? theory to a range of phenomena, from job hunting and organizations solving complex problems, to the spread of disease and the cascade-like dynamics of cultural fads. In the modern world, it is not enough to recognize that we are all connected; we must go further to understand both the patterns of these connections and the way they drive our individual and collective behavior.

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing by Peter Deutsch are even more true in the mobile distributed computing:

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn’t change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous

The Most Powerful Mobile Calculator Ever

Developed by Zeno Crivelli, MathMe (Mathematica micro edition) is J2ME application for Mathematica that connects to a remote kernel running on a full-fledged server to do the computation.

The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play

I finally took some time to read some Jane McGonigal and her A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play. Well, ok I haven’t read it all… because she is too verbose at times. Nevertheless, she makes interesting arguments on demistifying the dangerous credibility of pervasive games. She focuses on two examples of pervasive play to show that gamers maximize their play experience by performing belief, rather than actually believing, in the permeability of the game-reality boundary. Her definition of pervasive play is “it consists of mixed reality games that use mobile, ubiquitous and embedded digital technologies to create virtual playing fields in everyday spaces.

Immeersive games promise to become not just entertainment, but out lives. But to what degree does a person belive her own performance? The critics say you never really know when you are playing. The contemporary games is charactarized primarly by his confused credulity. Sven Halling, CEO of It’s Alive, faced an international reception of his pervasive game that included a frequently expressed anxiety about players losing touch with reality and losing themselves in the games. Halling saying

“In countries like Austria and Switzerland, they like the games, but don’t dare launch it. They feel it might be dangerous.”

Reason Locations as Semantic Places Rather than Coordinates

Personal Location Agent for Communicating Entities (PLACE), developped in 2003 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboraroty, is an infrastructure that incorporates multiple location technologies for the purpose of establishing user location with better coverage, at varying granularities, and with better accuracy. The paper provide insight into an approach toward bulind an infrastructure with location-sharing in mind from its conception. They promote a mixed used of location systems. Each location system enerally has both unique feature and limitations in term of technology, accuracy, scalibility, and cost. In the past there have been attempt to create common spaltion location data sets condisting in geodetic latitude, longitude and altitude, accuracy and time of measurement, speed, direction, course, and orientation. PLACE’s approach is to reason about locations as semantic places rather than coordinates. The problem is that there can be many different representations for the same location and having syntatically identical representations for different locations. There is also the problem of relational information. Notions like “near” show the contextual complexity we face.

La Wi-Generation

Dans La Wi-Generation : WiMedia (WUSB), Wi-Fi, WiMax (WDSL), Wi-Mobile, Jean-Michel Cornu, parle des types de réseaux: les réseaux personnels (PAN), locaux (LAN), métropolitains (MAN) ou distants (WAN) et les réseaux sans fil IEEE qui vont peut-être les influencer. Les réseaux informatique (IEEE Ethernet) semble prendre pas sur les réseaux télécom. Principallement parce que le monde sans fil de IEEE orienté jusqu’à présent plus vers le nomadisme, s’ouvre peu à peu au handover et à la mobilité. La qualité de service pour sa part reste encore un problème pour les réseaux sans fil IEEE.

Wi-Mobile permettra d’ajouter la mobilité aux réseaux sans fil métropolitains (WMAN). Le standard associé, IEEE 802.16e, est attendu pour fin 2005 ou début 2006. La vision du Wi-Mobile est celle de « l’Internet Ambiant » : chaque personne ou objet doit pouvoir se connecter où il le veut quand il le veut, qu’il se déplace ou non. Par contre, la couverture avec ses problèmes de canyons et d’interférances n’est pas mentionnée.

Le handover est une manière d’augmenter la connectivité. Jean-Michel Cornu parle du “handover” qui permet de passer de façon transparente d’une cellule à une autre (à ne pas confondre avec le roaming qui est un accord commercial permettant d’utiliser le réseau d’un autre opérateur). Il définit 3 types de handovers:

• Le handover horizontal : passer d’une cellule à une autre utilisant la même technologie ;
• Le handover vertical : passer d’un type de réseau à l’autre (de Wi-Fi, à la 3G, au satellite…) ;
• Et maintenant le handover diagonal : entre W-USB, Wi-Fi, WDSL et Wi-Mobile qui utilisent des technologies sous-jacentes communes.

Back on the J2ME Wagon

Since the 4-5 years J2ME exist, I have this ritual of writing an “hello world” example, but without taking time going deeper in the code. So here we go again. I read the current “Survey of J2ME Today“, got in the spirit by reading John Carmack’s “Cell phone adventures” installed Sun’s and Nokia’s developers kits, integrated them to Eclipse with EclipseME and deployed in a few minutes my new jad and jar files. The development cycle go faster and this time! Hopefully, time allocation, won’t make me fall off the wagon once again this year.

Jini Starter Kit

Last year’s and the year before, and the year before, … killer network technology, namely Jini, gets yet another opportunity to shine with the release of the Jini Starter Kit. The aim of the kit is to make Jini more accessible to every-day developpers. Surprisingly enough, XML’s Tim Bray got interested in lately. In “Jini and the Tokyo Subway” he rightly advocates that MPRDVs (Minimum Progress Required To Delacre Victory) like him would need an even lower barrier to entry.

Jini is great because it is an implementation of many smart network programming and it works! It is also great to learn about network programming. Hopefully, this starter kit is a step for better understanding Jini’s key concepts by providing easier development cycle.