Opportunistic mobile games using public transportation systems : a deployability study

With the growing availability of personal communication devices, we are witnessing a tremendous increase in the demand for mobile services based on location and context. Mobile gaming as a service is, of course, no exception. Unfortunately, differently from other services, location- and context-based gaming strictly requires near-field communication to interact with nearby players to create teams and arenas. Since currently adopted technologies suffer from scalability (Bluetooth) or energy (WiFi) constraints, opportunistic networks (ONs) have already been addressed as a viable solution to involve a considerable number of players on a wider area. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear how player experience will be affected by the increased delay and probabilistic message forwarding introduced by an ON. In this paper, we address the aforementioned problems by studying, by means of simulations, the feasibility to deploy a contact-based game on top of the ON provided by the public transportation systems (PTSs) of three cities: Milan (Italy), Edmonton (AB, Canada), and Chicago (IL, USA). Furthermore, to provide playability and scalability considerations, we also study an opportunistic collaborative version of a famous standalone game. The focus on this specific game is functional to foster the use of the PTS itself. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we provide simulation results hinting that deployment on a PTS is feasible when targeting users commuting inside the city. Secondly, we provide a number of considerations and guidelines for game designers to actually deliver a compelling and intriguing experience.