Geosop
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2012-2013. Adding spatial and real-life components to the Moonga online card game. |
Geosop is a CTI-funded project where TaM brings innovative features to Moonga, a successful online mobile game developed by EverdreamSoft SA. To remain competitive in the market, Moonga needs to periodically introduce new functionalities to its gaming community. In this project we integrate geo-localization of cards and players in the game, which leads to the two main challenges of the project: The first is building a set of tools allowing the definition and management of complex geographical areas delimiting the card's availability in space. The second is the evaluation of the trust to attribute to the position returned by a smartphone user.
Innovation
The Guild management system and the trust engine are what makes Moonga unique. The users are able to band together and fight for territories using the mobile location detection features, while the trust engine automatically checks for and rejects would-be cheaters.
- Guild Management. One-on-one games now become collaborative and more socially engaging. Using the features provided by the GeoGuild framework, the players can group and fight for a common goal.
- Geolocated Territories. Using location-based features, the simple games acquire new levels of complexity and become more challenging and more interesting. The actions are linked to the location of the players which encourages them to interact more in real life and to group based on their location.
- Trust Engine. The trust engine automatically detects and punishes location cheaters on the game.
GeoGuild
GeoGuild is a set of tools that can enrich video games through geolocation features. It consists of a server and a Javascript/HTML library.
GeoGuild Server
The GeoGuild server is in charge of applying all the game rules, calculating and the constraining them and applying them to territories. Additionally, the maps configuration is stored in the DB in the server. Through HTTP requests, the server can communicate with both the GeoGuild API and the native application. The server accepts a set of predefined commands and parameters, and returns JSON formatted responses.
GeoGuild API
The GeoGuild API is managing the maps and the visual features necessary to the guilds and the territories. The API can communicate with the server through HTTP requests. GeoGuild API can be included in the native application using a WebView component.
GeoGuild in Moonga
GeoGuild brings a set of new features in Moonga, for managing guilds and territories. The players can group and form guilds and conquer territories in the areas where they are located. GeoGuild offers different functionalities to allow the players to manage their guilds, check global and weekly leaderboards and battle other guilds for coins and territories.
TrustPos
TrustPos is a trust engine that helps to detect location liars in geolocalized games. The trust engine creates a trust value for each player based on the context of the interactions in the game. This trust value is used to estimate whether a user is reliable or not.
Typically when one user is playing a gelolocalized game, the game will display an alert if the player is not where he is pretending to be.
TrustPos provides a graphical management tool for the moderators of the game, to check the different user actions and the trust engine's decisions.
Trust Engine
When one or two users play together in the game by sending their locations, the information is processed by the trust engine. After reviewing the context information and the history of the users the trust engine is able to determine how trustworthy each user is.
After several interactions between players and the game, the trust engine is able to refine the trust value for each user. We can ask for one user to check whether his position is reliable or not.
The management tool provides simple charts with information and statistics about the different players on the system. For instance, we can see the behaviour of a user and the evolution of his trust.