GameOn: P2p gaming on public transport

Abstract

Mobile games, and especially multiplayer games are a very popular daily distraction for many users. We hypothesise that commuters travelling on public buses or trains would enjoy being able to play multiplayer games with their fellow commuters to alleviate the commute burden and boredom. We present quantitative data to show that the typical one-way commute time is fairly long (at least 25 minutes on average) as well as survey results indicating that commuters are willing to play multiplayer games with other random commuters. In this paper, we present GameOn, a system that allows commuters to participate in multiplayer games with each other using p2p networking techniques that reduces the need to use high latency and possibly expensive cellular data connections. We show how GameOn uses a cloud-based matchmaking server to eliminate the overheads of discovery as well as show why GameOn uses Wi-Fi Direct over Bluetooth as the p2p networking medium. We describe the various system components of GameOn and their implementation. Finally, we present numerous results collected by using GameOn, with three real games, on many different public trains and buses with up to four human players in each game play. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).