GeoGames and GeoDesign

The concept of GeoDesign, attributed in large part to Carl Steinitz at Harvard University, has recently been promoted as a framework for a tighter integration of geospatial technology with a design process (Dangermond, 2009). The GeoDesign concept includes at least four elements; Sketching of potential plans and designs, Spatial models that can simulate impacts of proposed designs, Rapid feedback on the effects of any proposed/sketched design, and Iteration through several alternative designs (Koncz, 2010). 

Clearly, a combination of gaming and GIS software has the potential to deliver most if not all of that functionality. This switch to a more design-oriented cartography and its implications for the traditional cartographic process is significant but has been recognized for a while by cartographers. The gaming/modeling approach to design is typically concerned as much about the function of each object in a level/map as they are with appearance and aesthetics. In contrast, a cartographer usually consider already existing objects and abstracts these to an object geometry that only sometimes also relate to its function in the context of the map. The GeoDesign approach takes cartographic design beyond the careful selection of visual variables to portray a world that is, to the purposeful creation and design of a world to be. 

If you care to watch my GeoGame presentation at the 2010 GeoDesign Summit it is here, 

with transcripts and all. More videos of much more accomplished speakers at this event can be found on the GeoDesign Summit website. 

The wider picture..

OK, so this is really tangential to this blog but I figured that anyone looking at this can see the connection (it's towards the end :-). This is my commentary from yesterday's panel session with Alec Murphy here at OSU Geography, as part of the Geography Awareness week. Dr. Murphy presented the NRC report on "Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences" and I was asked to comment on some portions of it, so here goes...

"I want to acknowledge the entire group of students in my Cartography seminar this and previous years, and particularly James Baginski, Jay Knox, and Xining Yang, for providing lots of inspiration and material for this commentary. And excuse me for being very positivist, but this is truly an exceptional time to be a cartographer and geographer, so I can't help it!

As evidenced by this report, where each chapter contain information graphics, and many maps, visualization is key to communicate and understand our world. But the report also challenge us to think of better ways to observe, analyze, and visualize a changing world. This vision is not new. About ten years ago, then vice-president Al Gore outlined his vision of a Digital Earth and TWENTY years ago, Yale professor David Gelernter wrote a book called “Mirror Worlds” where he wrote:

'...someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital – will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand  places. This Mirror World you are looking at is fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables. It is infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.', and he went on to say...'Mirror worlds will transform the meaning of 'computer'.” (Gelernter 1991, 1)

 It is clear by now that many of the elements of what these two visions articulated have now become reality.

The idea that our real world is reflected in a 'mirror' representation is taking shape in front of us, and because of us.

Research on games goes mainstream?

I was intrigued to see the NYTimes Science section this morning with '...prognostications for science in 2011 from 10 leading figures...'one of which is Jane McGonigal, featured below and visiting our campus TODAY! so cool. She mentions a really nice GeoGame platform called GROUNDCREW - http://groundcrew.us/



I guess the take-home is...well... maybe that gaming is now so ubiquitous/powerful that it can't be ignored by anymore who is interested in environment - society - technology relations. We (the plugged-in part of the world) are all the cartographers of a mirror world (see Gelernter 1991). We shape it through our daily activities, consciously or not. Games will be part of that cartography as we progressively mix reality with imaginary worlds, so the games will record and also help us understand our soon to be past, present and, in my opinion, also educated guesses about our future.

A musical postcard from the past with a birds-eye view

This is cool! My past gets a postcard from my future as a map of the present zooms by. You can try it yourself...
http://thewildernessdowntown.com/
It is a playful mix of personalized items, a decent soundtrack, and actually inspires some reflection on how I got here. In a way a GeoGame but very different than how I have conceived of it. Thanks to Markus Hernandez in my GEOG480 class who brought this to my attention.

Serious games make for serious fun

Well, I just thought that headline was snappy and had some relevance to what I am currently thinking about. There is no doubt that the interest from funding agencies have started to take off with even a few recent calls from NSF. As I was pouring through one of these I remembered one of the critical remarks I've heard about trying to learn about human social behavior through what people do in a game; 'how can we tell that what they do in this virtual environment is what they would do in reality?'. It struck me that this is really a total misunderstanding of what type of reality we could address with games. "Real life" decision making is increasingly supported by, and conducted through, virtual spaces. Just think about GIS and the realm of spatial decision support system. A GeoGame is essentially a continuation of that same environment, extended into possible futures. Looking at GeoGame behavior can really help us better understand those dynamics by providing a somewhat controlled experimental environment. This is pretty awesome and certainly a promising platform for doing computational social science .

Oh, and it is soo cool hat Jane McGonigal (see post below) is coming to OSU! get your tickets 

IBM City One a disappointment

At long last IBM's venture into using games to promote smarter cities have launched.




Unfortunately, playing this game feels like a long commercial for the various IBM services that a city manager might be interested in. It implements a fairly straight forward pre-determined sequence of actions and results that are not very engaging. I hoped for more but by all means check it out and make your own opinion.

GeoGame Green Revolution

To continue from ... the TELR grant allowed us to develop a more sophisticated prototype game primarily for classroom use. After the initial trials we decided to use two open source platforms; Project Darkstar by Sun Microsystems and World Wind by NASA. A computer science graduate student worked on the project part time during winter and spring quarter and full time over summer quarter when most of the work was completed.

Now, this might not look like much but we think it is a significant step towards creating a development platform for massive multi-player online geographic games (oh dear, that will be MMOGG). The thing that we are most proud of here is that we have separated the interface from the assets and rules so that it becomes more modular and easier to change the parameters of the game. So, an external onotlogy file (in OWL) contains all the information about what a game contains, how many players it can take, which geographic data to load, and which rules to use. Essentially that ontology defines what exist in the game. Another separate Jess (that's the Java Expert System Shell) CLP file has all the rules for the game. So we can modify e.g how yield is calculated without having to modify the program code. Finally, the game is situated based on a KML file (that' your typical Google Earth geodata format) that contains the farmland areas where the game is going to be played. This makes it possible to move the game from being played in Punjab, India to Marion, Ohio if you want. Obviously we did not have the time to code a game configuration interface or manual, so these kind of tweaks are a bit undocumented and hidden, but they work!

The power of games

In this hilarious and provocative TED presentation JMcG  says it all. We need more people to spend more time playing meaningful games. We already have a generation of world-savers at our disposal and they possess...

The Four Superpowers of Gamers, i.e.:

An urgent optimism - believing that an epic win is always possible
A tight social fabric - actively building networks of trust
A blissful productivity - happy to be working hard
A sense of epic meaning - ready to take on planetary scale missions

So enjoy her talk and join the ranks of serious gamers to save the world.



Jane's book "Reality is broken..." is most likely a good read and eventually made some press in my native Sweden.

Gaming and Computational Social Science

Thanks to Bryan Mark who alerted me to the coming http://www.fateoftheworld.net/ game I got into a string of really interesting thoughts and works on the use of games for social awareness and change. This game is a climate change scenario game with some cool looking virtual globe graphics and other wise standard-looking map game components. The virtue of it seems to be the scientific basis on which they claim to have built their simulation engines in order to model the consequences of players' actions on the environment. It then strikes me as strange when one of their bloggers, Ian, comes down hard on academic efforts at http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT at building a global modeling and simulation platform. Critical reviews are necessary to move projects forward but a total slashing of this project seems a bit of an overreaction.

Anyway, this took me through a few papers in Science into the realm of Computational Social Science and Mining Our Reality. Absolutely fascinating stuff and well worth reading for anyone doing social science research in this day and age. The core ideas are that our increasingly wired society carry around gadgets that an many ways can capture information about what do, e.g. "...locating you to within a few meters, an accelerometer that detects when you are walking versus stationary, a microphone that detects both conversations and background noises, a camera that records where each picture was taken, and an interface that observes every incoming and outgoing e-mail and text message. The potential benefits of mining such data are various; examples include reducing traffic congestion and pollution, limiting the spread of disease, and better using public resources such as parks, buses, and ambulance services." (Mitchell, 2009) Obviously with huge implications for things like privacy.

Wow, this will be a great topic for the GEOG880 seminar in Cartography I teach this quarter!

From idea to first prototype

Once we had the idea of using a virtual globe as a game board we had to figure out how to do it. Since we were geographers with limited computer and coding skills we had to seek outside help. Being at a place like Ohio State is a huge advantage in that situation because there is always an expert in whatever you can come up with. In this case we talked with the directors of CETI, Drs. rajiv Ramnath and Jay Ramanathan. It turned out that they offered project oriented capstone classes in things like Enterprise Architecture (CSE 757) Software Engineering (CSE 758) and Service Oriented Computing (CSE 762) and students team were always on the lookout for challenging projects. As a sponsor of two such capstone projects we got to experience some prototype functionality for the envisioned games.

The first prototype was built in the spring of 2008 using Openlayers and managed to handle real-time interaction on a map between simultaneously logged-in users. The next prototype was built in the fall of 2008 and experimented with the newly released Google Earth javaScript plug-in for web-browsers. It could handle multiple players around a RISK-style, command-and-conquer type of game where players could interact through chat and see other player's moves in real time. Another feature was the ability to freely add additional geographic data to the map display. One of the things I find most interesting with the GeoGame idea is the ability to have these game-like scenarios develop over time as a result of player's interactions, identified needs for additional information, or modifications to the rules of engagement, all decided by the participants/players. IF we can find a clever way of saving these preferences we can allow users to build on previous experiences and developments of a game, from a simple adoption of a board game, to a complex, dynamic, and organic system.

These prototypes gave us enough insight into the technical challenges and possibilities of our idea in order to formulate a robust proposal for an internal development grant (TELR Expertise grant ~$10k). This grant helped fund a Master's student to do some serious coding and development. It also provide technical, and design support for the adoption of the game in an educational setting. mor on that next time.

How we came up with the GeoGame idea

The whole idea came about in 2007 when one of our undergraduate students came to me and wanted to do an independent study with me and design a new game map for the Days of Wonder board game Ticket to Ride. There are several unofficial versions of the game using different parts of the world as a backdrop for the game (see e.g. this unofficial version for Scandinavia) and this student wanted to do one for Canada. Now, during his work we discussed if there were ways that you could embed some more realistic aspects that would have people who play the game actually learn something about Canada, transportation systems, or whatever... We also started to talk about online versions of the game and what we could if we could somehow tap into online mapping services... Yes, what would happen?

We saw all kinds of fun games that obviously could be done where we could use real information from the map as a substitute for some of the really artificial numbers and look-up tables you can find in the regular boardgames. For example, in the game RISK you get your troops reinforcements based on a table that tells you that you get a new army for each territory you control + an army for each city in those territories. In addition you can get some bonus armies if you control an entire region. But these are just numbers. If we instead related those numbers directly to information about GDP or actual population counts, then players would probably learn something about the real world while playing the game and having fun. Another example is Monopoly where a lot of us can recall the rent for Broadway but have no idea what the actual rent is on Broadway, NY. Haboro, by the way, had a really cool GeoGame up to promote their new game Monopoly City Streets. (Background image source: AP Images)

There's was also recently an interesting note on GPB News about what Monoply can teach players and what it misleads people to think. In that article Russ Roberts, a professors of economics at George Mason University, argues that the real kick comes when you allow players to negotiate and bend the rules as they go along playing the game. And this is where we see GeoGames can become a really interesting tool. It could provide a way to simulate market dynamics, peoples social interaction, around a spatial problem. More on that another time.

What are GeoGames?

So, I've finally come around and created a space for my thoughts around my GeoGames idea that came about in the summer of 2007. Actually, it's not just my idea. A whole lot of people have contributed to this so hopefully I will be able to give credits in due time.

Anyway, a good start to get an idea of what a GeoGame could be is to watch this YouTube clip with one of our prototype creations. This is a game for the Microsoft Surface platform in which each player (up to four) gets to pick territories from a map of U.S. states and then tries to take over other states in a command-and-conquer style of play. The real kicker is that we use live web services or other sources to pull in state population, gross state product, and current weather from NOAA to influence game dynamics such as number of troops and state value.

Computer Science students Patrick Losco, Kyle Hiltner, Anderson Bell, and Kevin Fast built the application under the supervision of Dr. Igor Malikman in the CS&E 762, Web-Services-Based Distributed Systems Project capstone course. I was the 'sponsor' of the project and provided the idea to the application and functional requirements; it had to be interactive, map based, relate to geography and include real information about the map areas as well as live information such as weather to take into account for the game play. The OSU Digital Union provided support and access to the surface table, software development kits, and laptops for the development.

So, hopefully this gives you an idea of what a GeoGame can be. Obviously, with all the geographic data out there you can probably think of all kinds of games that could be played like that. And that's partly what we're doing in this project, coming up with innovative way to use online maps, geodata, and players to create engaging environments for learning, fun, and serious stuff too.