Coordinator:
Martin O'CONNOR

Multiplayer Game - The Maze

The Water Multi-Player Game (MPG) has substantially changed in terms of design and application platform from initial ideas. Rather than being a ‘traditional’ multi-player game run from a PC we have, in collaboration with YDreams, designed a simple game to be played via mobile telephone technology. This was done to provide a more engaging application, easier to use, quicker to play, and which utilises an emerging popular application platform – the mobile phone.

The game is played between two players on their mobile phones (or indeed over the internet) and contains three elements:

• A maze which is initially hidden by a series of blank tiles. At game start, each player can see the centre of the maze with their marker.
• A picture of your opponent’s maze
• A set of timed questions to answer / challenges to complete – each correctly answered question or completed challenge exposes a tile to reveal a part of the maze

The objective of the game is to get your marker out of the maze before your opponent. Players select one of the eight tiles around their marker to try and erase – if they successfully answer a question or complete a challenge in the alloted time, the tile is erased and they can see a new part of the maze. They can then move their marker along and select another tile to erase. The players are linked because each one can see the other’s maze. However, even if you can see that your opponent is making progress, you cannot move your marker until you have erased the tiles from your own maze. So, by making progress towards escaping from the maze you are providing your opponent with information about the maze’s structure – although you might also be leading them down a dead end! Players do not take it in turns to try and erase a tile, it is simply a question of who can get out of the maze the quickest.

Some other features of the game design are:

• Each game starts with a randomly selected maze configuration – there can be hundreds of these.
• The level of difficulty could be increased by (a) making the maze bigger or more complicated, or (b) asking more difficult questions / setting harder challenges.
• There is the potential to develop other versions of the game (farming, bio-diversity, football, etc.).
• The game could be adopted to different regional and linguistic contexts simply by changing the questions asked to make them locally relevant.