Hi,
I am currently developing a mobile game which is for the sake of this discussion similar to pokemon go. I am heavily relying on the data from Openstreetmap to generate the objects for my game. Recently I was thinking about how some people where playing pokemon go in very inappropriate places, like for example the nazi concentration camp memorials or other such places where mobile gaming can be seen as a very rude thing to do. Naturally I want to prevent such events in the first place by not adding content to my game at those types of locations. As this reasoning applies not only to my specific game, but to all such pokemon-go-like games (which will surely appear more in the future), I think it would be nice to have a tag in osm to mark such places. I was specifically thinking about mobile_gaming=no.
As I am relatively new to Openstreetmap I feel kind of nervous about introducing a completely new tag and wanted to ask here first, if this was a good idea and if maybe such a tag already exists and I just wasnt able to find it.
Regardless of the appropriateness of such a tag, it will be years before any usable coverage of such a tag was established through the normal OSM tagging and editing practices.
I guess you don’t want to wait that long before releasing your game
I therefor strongly recommend you to rely on current tagging schemes and create a kind of “blacklist” of features not to include for your specific purposes. E.g. any tags like:
Yes, that list will be long… very long. But at least it will have relative consistent results, and is do-able now. It would allow you to filter out at least some of the most inappropriate places.
We normally tag only what we see on the ground. Unless the place has a sign that prohibits mobile gaming, we should not map it.
I’ll agree with mboeringa that the game developers should create their own list of places they want to avoid, based on tags, and perhaps on individual places as well.
Maybe there are mobile games that are appropriate to play in some musea, especially when the museum is targeted to children.
I also agree that such a tag would be inappropriate.
Where it is possible to rely on tags at all, it should be based on some property that is measurable on the ground, and which implies it is an inappropriate location. That means you would need to have rules for which properties and combinations are inappropriate.
A variation of this comes up with cycling routes. People want to tag a road as unsuitable for cycling, because the mapper thinks it is too dangerous, but the only legitimate way of doing this is to tag things like the number of lanes, and whether it is a primary road.
One other thing. At least in some countries, the Pokemon Go people may have a business model patent. You should make sure your lawyers check for this.
Of course I will also rely on other already existing tags to rule out most of those places. Besides that, I have a database with locations that I manually removed from the game. Also, I never had in mind to use this tag for example on every cemetery, because it is already clear from the other tags, that gaming is inappropriate. I was just wondering if it may be useful to have an additional tag for this kind of things, like for example at some memorial sites where the operator is “unhappy” with such behaviour. I guess that was not very clear from my first post.
I understand the problem, that this can be very subjective and maybe even depend on the kind of game/app. For this reason it may be better to restrict the usage of such a tag to places where prohibitive signs exist or where guards are present which indicate to the visitors that mobile phone usage/gaming is inappropriate. In that case there would also be something visible (our at least experienceable) in the real world, which I understand should normally be the case for osm-features.
