Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I still miss Ingress, even if it was just a way to help Google map walkable paths.

Every once in awhile I daydream about how to make an AR game that isn't trivially spoofable with GPS hackery, and that rewards more social interaction, even if it's not face-to-face. Only thing I've come up with is placing physical objects you have to scan, that work like 2FA tokens that display changing codes. Maybe even changing QR codes. With e-ink displays, it might even be plausible to have them be battery-powered and long lasting.

View on HN

The problem with that is that game will have the Ingress/PGo/Wizards Unite problem of limited activities outside crowded urban areas but 1000-fold because you're adding physical infrastructure. And on top of the issues of just getting them out there there's the other issue of just coordinating placing all those locations and making sure your infrastructure doesn't get ripped up for being an eyesore or for angering some local politician.

One alternative might be to combine multiple location sources, eg: GPS, local wifi and cell tower data to cross check. Spoofing all those at once should be harder but the OS would have to support lower level access to the location info. In a similar vein there's probably some way to validate the GPS info if the app had access to the incoming signals more directly as those and the slight jitter coming from reflected GPS signals should be harder to spoof.

I think Ingress actually ended up solving most of those problems - from what I read on forums, it became more difficult to spoof your location, and they would track the plausibility of player moves - anyone moving around faster than a slow driving speed would be penalized.

And yup, it's a problem outside of urban areas. Honestly, if I were designing an ARG game, I probably wouldn't even try, but explicitly limit it to dense environments. Roll out in New York, Chicago, San Francisco.

Yeah that's another option even if it doesn't totally eliminate the problem it does severely hamper the power of spoofing. It does fail if part of your goals is to geofence content like Pokemon Go does (did? It's been a while since I played but I doubt they removed the region specific pokemon) since just disappearing in one location and appearing somewhere else hours later isn't that weird. IIRC in pokemon go some of the later GPS spoofers would have you walk around a map instead of jumping instantaneously from location to location.

Oh, appearing and disappearing somewhere hours later was fine. But appearing in Los Angeles, then five minutes later popping up in New York would earn you a ban.

There's Munzee, that uses QR codes stuck on items. I've never played it, but a buddy of mine loved it a couple years ago. I believe it had an active community at the time. It didn't interest me, so I can't comment further on it.

I grok the issue regarding socializing. I was doing some WU-GO last night, and ended up attacking a fortress with somebody, but couldn't find them while I was in a town plaza. They may have been parked in a car nearby, but it would be kind of creepy to walk over to someone sitting in a car at 11pm and ask them if they're playing the same game as you.

I thought about printed QR codes, but one person could take a picture and share it with others, defeating the purpose of proving that someone was at some location at a given time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com