2011-2012-Modern Tagfare

Modern Tagfare, "tag for the 21^st century"

by Anton Jongsma and Vincent Velthuizen

Our initial idea was to mimic the game “Encounter”. This is a Russian game with many variants, something that will be coming back later, but the version we focused on was “Wet Wars”. Participants of this game are both hunter and hunted, everybody gets the profile of there target (how detailed this is may vary for example do you get a photo or not) and while you are trying to get your target you have to watch out your not shot, shooting is done with a water-pistol, hence the name. We thought we might add a dimension to this game by allowing players to use their smart-phone. And given the variations in the game it would certainly allow us to expand on the initial idea if it proved to be very easy to implement (naive as we were we thought it might be).

So the concept became to not have a profile but the location of your target and using some technology to “shoot” somebody. At this point, in order to use as many different technologies as we could, we were thinking Bluetooth. We would connect all the phones to a server to exchange location data. To tag we would check if you are in Bluetooth range. As an alternative we thought of using NFC, forcing you to physically tag someone. We never developed this idea due to a lack of NFC enabled smart-phones. We also thought about using QR-codes to interact with objects in the real-world. For example, a QR code on a wall could get you some special weapon.

We decided to implement this idea on Android. After some struggles getting eclipse and the Android SDK working for both of us we did rather quickly manage to get the maps and location services working. We then made a website and started retrieving data from the server, stuff like where the game is, who are participating and what rules are used. Though we only managed to implement one game-type, we did put in some of our imagined extra's: Players can drop “GPS mines” that go off when the target walks over them. A cloak can be activated to disable sending location updates to the person hunting you for up-to 30 seconds, and a shield can be activated to make a tag bounce of and actually “kill” the hunter instead of the target.

We have come across some interesting problems implementing this game. For example, GPS reception is not always as good as you want it to be. In one case our position was off by at least 20 meters. 3G reception turns out to be flaky as well. Together with a weak protocol, this caused some nasty bugs. Cheating in this game would be very easy as well. There is no way to verify a person is on the actual location where he/she claims to be.

Our final thoughts on this project are varied. We'd both like to finish the application making it a game you could actually play with a group of friends. Also we have a lot of ideas of where it could go after that. If we ever get to that point remains to be seen though. One of the first things we'd like to do is add missions, given a certain location, solve a certain thing, this might be taking a picture or getting a certain piece of data (remember the QR-codes). Another thing we´d really like is some form of team-play. This is easy to see in missions: having a certain amount of people in certain places at one time and doing a certain thing, a bit like a reverse flash-mob. Team-tag (yes, like tag-team but different) would likely involve some sort of spawn-point forcing tagged players to go to a certain spot (possibly linked to real-life medical locations like a hospital, doctors office...) instead of just dropping out of the game completely.