The Interface

The Game

The game itself begins with a single infected player. It is their objective to spread the virus as far a possible by tweeting near other twitter geolocation users who in turn become 'infected'. The virus would then spread naturally, most unaware of the game. Those that are aware can attempt to avoid the virus by avoiding tweeting in areas they know to be infected and people with it can attempt to spread it.

We expect the game could run for weeks if not months and eventually involve most regular twitter geolocation users.

Interface Design

Our interface will be made using flash and will simply consist of a number of icons overlaying a zoomable map using the latitude and longitude from the data.

Specification

Our project must do several things.

• It must create queries for the Twitter Search API
• It must record the response in a useful format
• It must cycle through these records and update the data
• It must add nearby detected users to the data
• It must show visualise this data
• It must demonstrate the spread between people

Tweetflu

For this project we came up with the idea of using geolocated tweets in twitter to create a game on a huge scale. At the start a single user will be recorded in a database as ‘infected’. Their geotagged tweets provide a time and place which is then queried using Twitter’s search API for more people who were in the near at the time. These people also become ‘infected’ and the process is repeated for everyone in the database at regular intervals. The information stored in the database will allow us to visualise the spread of the ‘virus’. We predict that the spread will be exponential and with enough time and resources would reach most of the people that use geotagging. The game is based on Virus which is in turn based on hit/tag.

There are two halves to the project, the first is the data collection and the second is visualisation of this data. The biggest problem is the limitation on the number of queries to the twitter APIs a single client can make within an hour before being blocked and the potential for the number of accounts overwhelming the system.

The data collection portion of this project will be written in Java because we have some experience with it and it’s more appropriate than other languages we know. We started with a small experiment using php to get the location of a tweet then list the users near it at the time which appears to work fairly well, it is now a case of porting and expanding this. The application will have to be able to read JSON and manipulate a mySQL/SQLite database.

New Direction

We weren’t satisfied with our original idea based on connect 4 as we felt it was more of a limitation then a source of inspiration. We came up with a new idea that would allow us to apply game logic in an interesting way while visualising social behavior.

Our original research covering boardgames remains valuable as it allowed us to explore various applicable gameplay mechanisms and tactics.

Change of plans

Our idea of connect four was that there would be two players in different rooms with empty connect four boards. This would be done using Arduino boards with sensors to detect when the users drop their 1 counter into a column (which would then slide out the bottom for reuse), then the current gamestate would either be displayed using LEDs or on a computer screen. Yet again though this was "just a game" so we decided that before we give our idea presentation we should have a discussion with Simon about some other ideas.

John and Simon had a little chat with Simon and our game idea changed to tig/tag/hit to allow us to create a virus-type game using Twitter.