Geodata Classification for Automatic Content Creation in Location-based Games
Key: TRGS17-1
Author: Thomas Tregel, Lukas Raymann, Stefan Göbel, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: November 2017
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Springer
Book title: Proceedings of the 3rd Joint International Conference on Serious Games
Keywords: Geodata, Procedural Content Generation, Location-based Games, Points of Interest
Abstract: The ubiquity of smartphones with integrated positioning systems made it possible to develop location-based games playable by most people without requiring additional equipment. Popular location-based games like In-gress or Pokémon Go have demonstrated the public interest in this genre and studies indicate that playing such games has a positive health influence related to the players’ increased movement. A big development challenge for these games is the content creation. With in-creasing area coverage the amount of potential players increases, which leads to a larger community. In location-based games points of interest for game loca-tions can be either generated semi-randomly, crowdsourced using user-generated content approaches or created by a game designer. Manually selecting points of interest (PoIs) of the real world for a game is time-consuming, expensive and often results in heterogeneous distributed PoIs with a low concentration in rural areas. It is thus worthwhile to use automatic ap-proaches instead, where PoIs are selected automatically from available geodata services based on their relevance. Relevant PoIs can for example be identified through metadata they are assigned with within the system. Using such an ap-proach gives even small game development studios with limited budget the pos-sibility to develop location-based games that can be played all around the world. This is in particular interesting for the development of serious games, which tend to have a lower budget compared to entertainment-based games. In this paper we present a system that uses georeferenced data from open avail-able sources to generate a collection of PoIs usable for location-based games of free definable target groups with the goal of providing a comparable game ex-perience everywhere. The content creation algorithm in our approach is fully parametrized allowing for individual configuration for desired PoI criteria.
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