Using Wireless Signals in Games

MetaByte writes "A swiss group has created a game for the Nintendo DS that utilizes the surrounding WiFi transmissions to set up the game world. By moving through the city, the game changes. Another game for the Nintendo DS creates an audible city from the wlan-waves. The Austrian artist Gordan Savicic takes the wlan landscape to a painful level. The density of the waves and strength of the encryption cause servos to tighten a corset. Moving lets you feel being disclosed of encrypted digital worlds that turns into useless electrosmog."

Neat.

[solios]

Now the big question: How long until major developers (Square, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, etc.) start integrating elements of this concept into their games? Picture a Castlevania that determines enemy strength or random drops based on ambient wifi traffic... or a Final Fantasy that uses wifi traffic as a random seed for enemy encounters, money drops, gambling odds, etc. Heck, even randomly generated enemies (imagine a wlan full of pr0n browsers - your sedate Animal Crossing-like environment would suddenly mutate into Urotsukidoji!) You could program a reasonably robust set of default variables in the event there's no wlan available, of course... ... but really, I'd like to see the DS wifi used for more than deathmatch, email and trading. And this, in my opinion, may well set a nice precedent.

Mapping where you are is nothing new...

[r_jensen11]

There was a game of "Monopoly" in London a while back that did this. I believe it's called Monopoly Live [monopolylive.com]

Virus

[Toonol]

David Braben's pc game Virus (several years old) had the contents of your hard drive popping up during gameplay. For instance, the contents of random text files might scroll by while playing. The game was aware of your disk structure, account settings, etc. At least, that's how it was described to me.

Seemed neat but dangerous. A certain amount of awareness of your environment can make games more interesting. Animal Crossing is another example; it's aware of the real time and date, and the passage of non-game time.

Random Seed

[Shritish]

Couldn't technology like this help with random number generators? If we can take useless "electrosmog" and use it to create structures within a game, I'm sure something like this could be used to generate something more towards 'true random'. If it has come down to things like the windows random number generator security problem http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/1528211 [slashdot.org] and attempts at simple methods of circumvention http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/10/147238 [slashdot.org], maybe it's time to look at elements outside of normal human control?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Neat.

[XdevXnull]

The DS also has a built in mic. Mostly I've seen it utilized in-game such that the player has to talk or yell or blow on the mic (e.g. in the latest Zelda you blow on the mic to blow out a candle). There's also potential here to collect ambient (audio) noise from the environment and integrate that somehow into the game. Combined with the wifi sampling, and you could have a very interesting way to change the game in very populous / busy areas.

Re:Cool, will try out soon

[i.of.the.storm]

Wow, way to be an asshole. Considering that no one else here has even tried running it, or at least hasn't posted anything about it I thought that my offer to test it was worth something. At least it's worth more than some anonymous idiot complaining about how I haven't contributed anything. Anyway, tried running it but it's kind of boring, basically triangles fly toward your box depending on the strength of the wifi signal from each access point, and you click on them repeatedly to destroy them.

Dragons at the Police Station

[callinyouin]

As an avid RPG fan, IMHO this approach to enemy generation is very appealing. Let's look at it this way. If I have a reason to battle a specific foe (often generated by hotspot X) it would be fun to travel in the "Real World" to a specific location as opposed to some place within the game. This is just a simple example. I'm sure there are more intuitive ways to apply this. I'm not saying that all RPG's should adapt to this approach but it would be neat on some, or in certain aspects of the game.