Week 5 : Alpha thoughts – on games and privacy
by Matt, Friday, February 12th, 2010
Development has started in earnest on Chromaroma. We are now in week 5 of development time.
The excellent Tom Taylor has built a very impressive prototype of the system in Ruby which is now live on alpha.chromaroma.com.
It currently scrapes journey history data from pay-as-you-go oyster users who subscribe to the game. It contains most of the basic requirements of game play and scoring that were planned.
Robin Shackford our flash developer is currently working on the visualisation which will make the players journey come alive both individually and from a bigger global perspective. The map of london transport comes to life!
A number of key questions are beginning to emerge around privacy. We have just switched on a blanket privacy policy that gives users the ability to choose which players they want to view their travel data and which they don’t, following the facebook model. This is obviously essential in a game based around sharing location. Although pinpointing players exact locations is impossible, 1 because it is only based on station entry and exit and 2 because of a 48hour lag betweenactual journey and journey history being published by oyster. But looking at journey histories over time it is possible to track patterns of travel and likely times in certain places and surprisingly you can quite easily work out a users approximate place of work and home manor.
Have we created a stalking app and unleashed a litigious monster?
The privacy is proving a tricky balance between play and safety. To build up effective gameplay is it essential that people can see the travel strategies of competing players? If a player hides their chess pieces and plays invisibly, even Garry Kasparov couldn’t compete on that uneven playing field.
A new dimension emerges where letting others view or not view your travel patterns becomes a strategic ploy. If someone stops sharing their details with me suddenly, can I infer from this that they are conspiring against me in the game or are they travelling somewhere that should be kept private from me. Which is essentially a persons right to privacy of movement. But if the person is a close friend or lover, we might ask the question – why? These are conundrums posed by facebook and its enormous user base on a daily basis, but does it have added significance when applied to mobility?
Hmm…maybe let the players be the judge.
Hmmm… This might not work *but*
What if the map on which the data is presented to the player was NOT the tube map? If it were transposed to the Paris Metro map for example, it might become apparent that I spend a lot of time at Gare du Nord, but unless you hunt down which LU station corresponds to it, you’re still none the wiser as to where I live.
A custom map would be most likely required in order to get a precise correlation of stops (and interchanges? eek) which gives scope to the notion of map revealing. There’s nothing more satisfying (to me) in a game than uncovering a new zone on a previously blank map.
In chromaroma I’ve so far not felt compelled to go anywhere I wasn’t going to go anyway (although I do feel very pleased when someone gives me an excuse to go to a station I’ve not been to since the game started). I have been tempted to make the most of paying for a day’s travel card by weaving in and out of every station along the circle line, but I’m more interested in seeing my natural travel patterns, and don’t want to screw it up with ‘false data’.
If there was a map to uncover I’d go EVERYWHERE. I’d take river taxis and trams and the new East London line extension.