Description:
Feeding Yoshi is a 'seamful' game developed by researchers in Glasgow University's Equator group in partnership with researchers at the University of Nottingham and the University of Lincoln.
Louise Barkhuus, Marek Bell, Steve Benford, Barry Brown, Matthew Chalmers, Malcolm Hall, Duncan Rowland, Scott Sherwood, Paul Tennent.
The game makes use of the everyday infrastructure of wireless networks around a city to create a game environment. The object of the game is to locate the eponymous Yoshis, which are actually secured wireless networks, represented as small furry creatures. Each Yoshi asks the player for a particular kind of fruit. Players must then grow and retrieve these fruits from plantations, which are actually unsecured wireless networks. Upon feeding the fruit to the Yoshi, players are rewarded with points. The number of points a player receives increases exponentially with the number of different fruit offered in a single feeding.
Players are encouraged to interact with each other by swapping their fruit. Players must regularly access a server web page to see how their score compares with that of their opponents. The game has recently been tested at sites in Glasgow, Nottingham and Derby.
Help on how to play Yoshi can be found here. Offline help is available during game play by choosing Help in the game's Tools menu.
