Cartography in a Gameful Context

Maps shape our view of the world and help us in our everyday lives to orient in unfamiliar territory. The art of creating maps however was reserved to a privileged group of people for a long time. Today’s progresses in technology have opened it to anyone with internet access, as free crowdsourced projects have emerged, dedicated to create an open map of the world. However, editing the map and contributing data is still harder than necessary and so the existing projects did not yet hit the masses. To solve this problem, cartography-related games are proposed in this thesis. Their goal is to unite cartographic work and gaming concepts in an easy to use abstraction layer, ready to be applied in a global, crowdsourced scale. The players should be enabled to participate immediately, without any cartographic background, and use their local knowledge to submit valuable geographic information. This approach makes it possible to create maps of unprecedented detail and actuality, which can make life easier and open whole new application ares for people with special interests (e.g. hiking, cycling) or disabilities (e.g. for blind people). This thesis will give an overview of ludic ways to contribute geographic data and provide background information about the concerning topics cartography, humanbased computation and games in general. Based on that, abstract concepts for cartography-games have been developed and three exemplary game descriptions are provided. The goal of this thesis is to discover, if cartographic work is possible and feasible in a gameful context.