Mogi Location-Based Mobile Gaming Hits Japan

Thanks to TheFeature for its article discussing the popular Japanese mobile phone game Mogi, a title which "uses both the position of players in the landscape, and the landscape itself to generate play." The French developers of Mogi at Newt Games explain: "We used the map to give [virtual] creatures some interesting behavior. Some creatures only hunt at night. Some hang around close to parks", thus: "If a player wants to find that [in-game] creature, they'll have to travel near a park [playing Mogi on their mobile phone] in the evening hours." A keen Tokyo-based player of the game also explains why he enjoys it: "All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me."

It won't spread.

Some creatures only hunt at night. Some hang around close to parks

Anyone in New York fancy going to a park at night time and waving around your expensive mobile phone?

Re:It won't spread.

Not just the players are in danger, imagine idiot drivers on their cellphones randomly flying across 4 lanes of traffic to avoid a monster or collect some treasure... It's just stupid enough that it might succeed in America.

Re:It won't spread.

...imagine idiot drivers on their cellphones randomly flying across 4 lanes of traffic...

Have you ever driven in Naples, Italy?

Re:It won't spread.

solution: impose a map of crime levels with the map of the city and direct players to the safest locations. bonus points if you also correspond it with a traffic density map, and direct players to areas with relatively low (but not zero) density of people, in order to minimize the game's impact on the outside world.

I can see easily that this game should be huge to advertisers. Imagine being able to direct people to your soba shop...

Re:It won't spread.

Problem: Players being directed to locations away from criminals.

Solution: Steal a game phone. Follow directions to locations where you can steal more phones.

Pokemon....

...and don't you dare say that isn't what it's going to come to. People are going to run around the country-side/planet chasing small cute fighting animals with one word vocabularies and, ultimately, train them to fight each other.

A mugger's dream?

You could hack the game so that your victims went to a suitable lonely dark corner of a park...or for the /.ers you could lure a dizzy bimbo to your house with the promise of a "special bonus" ;-)

Re:A mugger's dream?

but don't be disapointed if you find a 5-year old japanese girl on your doorsteps!

---

Sigs are for nerds...

Re:A mugger's dream?

Frankly, I think that's what they're looking for. They'll be more disappointed when they get the 55 year old man whose profile says he's a 5 year old Japanese girl.

logical extention

This seems like a logical extention of the pokemon style gameboy games. Hardware will be a big limiting factor, though, as will time if the game continues to play while you're not.

I like it

This is novel, and regardless of the dangers of doing this in the west - gimmie that phone now kid - this will catch on.

Anyone want to take a bet that this won't appear in the Pokemon series of games? Nintendo are not adverse to hardware add-ons. Not that they all succeed but that's another topic.

It gets kids out of the house, even interacting like geo-caching; I can see the press being positive over this, given the right spin. You'd have to avoid getting kids going to the park at night though, perhaps have the game force you to enter your birth date at the start.

Easy to get around but gives a legal/press get out clause.

Re:I like it

Pokemon Crystal in Japan had a cellphone play feature. It was short-lived, but innovative at the time.

Nintendo now have kiosks where gamers can play wirelessly against each other.

Could be good for geeks...

Perhaps they could put items or whatever in social areas, like clubs or bars. This way not only will us geeks get our exercise roaming around the city, we may be forced to mingle with real people. Maybe they could pay hot chicks to be waiting in a club, and the only way you can get experience points is to talk her into giving you a secret code! Just think, for a small montly fee you could get interaction with a hot chi...

sssh!! time to run and patent this brilliant money-making idea!!

Re:Could be good for geeks...

"sssh!! time to run and patent this brilliant money-making idea!!"

For some reason I read that as a "monkey-making" idea. It also seemed correct ;)

Pretty Woman

Maybe they could pay hot chicks to be waiting in a club, and the only way you can get experience . . . is to talk her into giving you a . . . Just think, for a . . . fee you could get interaction with a hot chi...

I don't mean to put a total damper on your pre-IPO frenzy, yet I cannot help but mention that prior art exists in the form of nothing less than the world's oldest profession. And a pimp's got a better business plan, too, because the chicks don't even have to be all that hot, and the "interaction" is way better than just silly game chit-chat.

Reality gaming!

This is seriously cool, but it would even be cooler if it would be available for PDAs and laptops due to the better systems these devices are running on. Of course a mobile phone has the advantage of locating, thus the PDA or laptop should be equiped with a GPS device, or something like GPRS. However, it would make these things much cooler than on the mobile phone: imagine virtual worlds based on the real world. So you can in-game walk the same street as you're walking in-real-life, but only in-game it's packed with action, wheres the in-real-life version is as boring as always. Now that would be reality gaming!

Re:Reality gaming!

So you can in-game walk the same street as you're walking in-real-life, but only in-game it's packed with action, wheres the in-real-life version is as boring as always.

I don't know about the real-life version being boring - I imagine it'd be quite entertaining to watch hordes of people walking into things and falling over because they were trying to play a game and walk down a street simultaneously (a bad move when many probably haven't yet mastered walking and chewing gum at the same time).

Plenty of scope there for passing away the time Nelson (from the Simpsons) style: Ha-ha!

Or, you could get interactive and try to break their minds by dressing up as characters from the game and confronting them in real life. Now that would be fun! :-)

Damn

I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me.

Those dealers for not standing still

Lawsuit pending?

Now all we need is for someone to wander into the path of a juggernaut while playing this and for them/their parents to sue the game maker - it'll be like the GTA fiasco all over again. Hmm.. now I think about it, imagine if you could use this with GTA - see a car you want to steal? Just wander over to it and you can steal it in the game.

Re: Mogi Location-Based Mobile Gaming Hits Japan

"All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me."

So the harder the game gets, the lesser your chances of reaching anywhere on time?

Advertising

This game could easily pay dividends in advertising... "Go find the new coffee flavour at the $tarbucks store".

Great way to get to know a city, though you'd really need to feel secure.

Could also be applied as a Virtual guide for a tourist trail. E.g. Walk around the countryside, get guided to the local stately pile or see if you can spot the rare lesser-spotted trilby in the bird sanctuary...

Reminds me of this story [slashdot.org]

At least the kids will have to leave the house

Instead of sitting at home playing Gamestation the japanese kids get some exercise by walking around in the city toying with their mobile phones. To me this looks like an improvement.

Nothing new ...

Finnish GSM Operator Dna (link here [dnafinland.fi]) had a some kind of Robot Wars game last year going on in Finland. It was playable in Helsinki central area and one had to find people around central that where in the game to engage and fight them and this was done by phone locationing.

Not even possible in the US. :(

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are any phones out yet that are capable of doing this. Even on phones that have the emergency GPS 911 system (based on the signal strength to various signal towers) - I didn't think the location information was available to software running on the phone itself (and was only readable by a 911 operator).

Sucks because this would be pretty damn cool.

There's a somewhat larger playing field over here in the US as well. :)

Dangerous

A device sending you to a park? at night? sounds right for a flashmugging [technicola.com]

Further...

A (female) friend of mine spends much of her time doing online fantasy RPing, she keeps complaining to me that idiot guys see that she plays as an elf, and think "my character need to #$%& her.", now, imagine this in real life, with GPS equipped phones, were you can track each other's movements, or just wait near some interesting item, add to this that Japan seems to have more than it's share of perverts...

ok, seriously...

What happens when an item is in the middle of a busy road or intersection?

Re:ok, seriously...

Live-Action FROGGER

Kanagawa?

cool, but is it available in english, and can I get it in Yokosuka or Yokohama? Tokyo is kinda far, especially the fasionable parts.

Potential for advertisers?

I can definitely see how this type of thing could be commercialized and taken advantage of. Imagine Starbucks paying the publisher to place extra special items in the vicinity their stores.. or a Makudonald's

how does it work?

I was under the impression that you can only be localized with a precision of around 100m using cellphone signal strength (maybe slightly better in urban centers) -- how will you lure players to some specific 'dark corner' then? I suppose the service providers could do some fancy triangulation with your signal strength at different stations, but a) you would have to get them to actually do that and give you the data, b) this would raise serious privacy issues.

this may be just a ploy to get people to accept tracking technologies. I have been waiting for them to come up with a reason why tracking us was a "good thing", but I didn't figure the rationale would be a game. I suppose, soon standard phones will come with gps receivers, and as to who your position is transmitted to -- well, you'll just have to trust the firmware does what the booklet says it does.

Re:how does it work?

The phones have GPS. The actual positional calculation is offloaded to the network. But non-GPS phones have pretty good accuracy in Japan due to the cell density, anyway.

I did some work on a similar type of game last year, and our main concern was whether we actually wanted people to physically meet each other, so we had virtual object layers superimposed on the city, where each player saw their own personalized layer: two people could be racing towards an object, but each saw the object in a different location.

Community support

Although going to look for a mythical creature in a city park at night might be considered a bad idea. It would be nice to know that at any point if you got into problems you could hit a "Panic" key on your phone/pda/etc and all other gamers in the vicinity would get a flag telling them to come to your assistance.

Re:Community support

Sounds like a good way to attract a nerdly victim with some high value electronic gear. Just punch the panic button and wait for the targets to walk up to you.

Pete, using the dark side

Re:Community support

Good point Pete. I guess it would all depend on the numbers involved. Even nerds can be dangerous when they Swarm! :)

Don't forget consumer demand...

some day, there'll be a huge scramble of people waiting for some locked gate or door to be opened in order to get a valuable item just within range. Remember what happened when some company came out with a handheld game that used barcodes to generate characters (Scannerz?). There were sudden shortages of commodity items.

And if any of you are in Japan

... and have the chance to own a GPS-enabled KDDI phone, just enter the "EZ Internet Number" 53577 to download the Java application and start playing.

And there currently is 1-month free trial running!

OK that's shameless promotion, I work for Newt Games :)

Sad Reflection On Society

We have about 1/3 of the well moderated comments on this thread talking about the dangers of going to a park at night.

Parks are some of the most beauitful areas of our world, and particularly in the city. They are not only beautiful during the day but also at night when everything looks different, wildlife acts differently etc.

It's so sad that so many people believe parks should not be visited at night... and how many believe it is the game makers responsiblity to keep people away from parks at night - surely it's the responsibility of no-one except (potential) criminals who may be there, and the police + management organisations whos job it is to keep those areas safe.

Instead of moaning or crowing about potential law suits for location based games, try lobbying your representatives to raise taxes and spend it on more police presence.

You see the commercial value in this?

Imagine I own a new store. I "sponsor" a power-up or a cool monster by paying mogi a lot of money.. the monster shows up every 4 hours or so... causing people to come hunt down the monster and conveniently end up inside my shop. (say in the corner, where I have a place for them to sit and drink some tea)

I don't know what mogi means in Japanese

But in Korean it means "mosquito."

Mogi chogi yogi.

-Peter

Criminal Hacks

Imagine hacking this system for evil deeds.

Steer an innocent guy to the wrong place at the wrong time -- he takes the fall for a bank robbery.

Maybe use the innocent guy as an unwitting drug mule?

-kgj

Wow, something like this could catch on!

This is pretty much a twist on the idea of Geocaching [geocaching.com]. Very cool. I would love to give this a try, especially if I could use a PDA on a 1xRTT network. You would have decent speed and the functionality of the PDA. Give it a few years and we will likely see some amazing stuff!

I'd like to see

this game combined with augmented reality technology

Blimey!

The other day you were all moaning how the lack of originality was ruining the industry. Bring it on, I say - this sounds great - hope they make one for London...

blast theory

This strikes me as quite similar to some of the work blast theory [blasttheory.co.uk] have been doing involving shared physical and virtual spaces.

In Can You See Me Now? runners carrying pdas tracked with GPS chased online players running around a virtual city by running around the equivalent real city.

In Uncle Roy All Around You members of the public on the street again have pdas, but they have to collaborate with online players to get to actual locations to retrieve physical objects for the online players.

nice that you can play this on your own phone though, we've been lending punters pdas, which isn't ideal, not so much people nicking the hardware but in terms of scalability.

Vampire the masquerade People Need this Tech

That way they could be lured into the the day light. You see, thats whats really intersting about Vampire the masquerade people - they really do ignite into flames when they hit open daylight. Thats why they must return to their mother's basements before dawn....

Damn Virtual Trespassers

How dare they put virtual objects on my Geolocation. A man's home is his Intellectual Property.

Hmm...GPS enabled PDAs

I think that it would be pretty cool to see location-based games on PDAs with GPS-enabling on them. People who play RPG games and are of the "explorer" type would be a good target for this game. I'm partly in the explorer sub-section, and I could see myself taking my PDA out to collect a special something or to go to a certain location to fight a location-specific monster.

Not sure I'd want to use the phone, though...would much prefer the larger screen and arguably better processing of a PDA

How to access phone GPS with Java?

Anybody know of a toolkit, api, library or other method to access the GPS data on cell phones? Clearly it's possible. The question is whether Mogi has paid big licensing dollars to the carriers and/or cell phone makers for access to this data.

Re:Take an object, leave an object

Turning Japanese, I'm turning Japanese, I really think so . . . .

Re:Take an object, leave an object

Did you look at the website?

This game is nothing like geocaching.

Re:Take an object, leave an object

no no, not geocaching, more like "virtual geocaching", if that.

you have to show up at a certain location in order to collect an "item" which is basically proof that you were at that location (maybe at a particular time).

kinda silly if you ask me (as is geocaching but I won't get into that).

Re:Take an object, leave an object

From you:

I don't want to say that the Japanese are expert imitators...

From post:

The French developers of Mogi at Newt Games explain...

Even if you don't read the article, at least read the post.

Re:Take an object, leave an object

Yeah the magic mushrooms I found it the park did make me grow, but I can't seem to find any fire flowers, feathers, or even a single giant windup sock.

Re:Bimyou

What about real RPGs with dice and game masters? You do know the computer versions were based on traditional game, right? Besides, haven't you heard of LARPs?

This is cool

Kigen resembles Mogi, with additional layers of complexity added: combat, technological evolution, conquering neighborhoods. Computer game players might think of Kigen as location-based StarCraft with a Civilization tech tree. Castelli agrees with a laugh that they were probably too early and too ambitious with that game design.

Just imagine you have just lost a fight against someone, then you notice the guy next to you is playing the same game you realise that he is the one who's just kicked you arse. Any sugestions on how this could end.