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Code Hunting Games: A Mixed Reality Multiplayer Treasure Hunt Through a Conversational Interface

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Book cover Internet Science (INSCI 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10750))

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe an online multi-player game that challenges players with abstract coding puzzles that are tied to a geographical location. The proposed system transposes the classical scheme of “treasure hunt” games into a mixed-reality game, where players must physically move in order to advance in the game, while at the same time interacting with a chatbot through an online messaging system. The implementation of the online game is described in detail and an overview of different deployments of the system is given, including a large-scale deployment during the European CodeWeek 2017. We discuss details of the proposed system, including lessons learned during the development and operation of the game. We also argue that mobile games like the one proposed can be successfully adopted for many different purposes, from entertainment to education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source code available at: https://github.com/CodeMOOC/TreasureHuntBot.

  2. 2.

    “Coding in your Classroom, now!” 22–27 August 2016 and “Making Apps in your Classroom, now!” 21–26 August 2017.

  3. 3.

    Full account of the CodeWeek event: http://blog.codeweek.eu/post/166975540609/the-codehunting-game-more-than-1000-people.

  4. 4.

    Official website: http://codehunting.games.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all members of the CodeMOOC community and all participants that have tested “Code Hunting Games” since the first run in 2016.

We also wish to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuable input.

Icons: server by Denis Shumaylov, smartphone by James Fenton, megaphone by Christopher Reyes in Figs. 2 and 3 released under Creative Commons 3.0 on The Noun Project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DiSPeA, University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy

    Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein, Saverio Delpriori, Brendan Dominic Paolini & Alessandro Bogliolo

Authors
  1. Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein
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  2. Saverio Delpriori
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  3. Brendan Dominic Paolini
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  4. Alessandro Bogliolo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Sotiris Diplaris

  2. Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Anna Satsiou

  3. SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

    Asbjørn Følstad

  4. National Center for Scientific Research, Agia Paraskevi, Greece

    Michail Vafopoulos

  5. SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway

    Thomas Vilarinho

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Klopfenstein, L.C., Delpriori, S., Paolini, B.D., Bogliolo, A. (2018). Code Hunting Games: A Mixed Reality Multiplayer Treasure Hunt Through a Conversational Interface. In: Diplaris, S., Satsiou, A., Følstad, A., Vafopoulos, M., Vilarinho, T. (eds) Internet Science. INSCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10750. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77547-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77547-0_14

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