Abstract
This chapter concentrates on the implementation of the geogame GeoMinasCraft and its use for geographical virtual explorations. The game was implemented to study the use of geospatial data for the visualizations of landscapes in a serious game. The users/players can take on an adventure, explore the landscapes, learn about geodiversity, and face different challenges. The game takes us to the City of Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais in Brazil. The city was selected due to its historical significance and socio-cultural values. We used satellite images and transformed them into blocks imitating these real-world landscapes and cities in Minecraft. We tested the game prototype with nine students which gave us the needed feedback for the improvements of the first prototype. This chapter summarizes the game concept, its implementation, and the testing results. We conclude the chapter with a discussion and further research directions.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the support from the support of CAPES, through the Overseas Sandwich Doctoral Program, under process 88881.189217/2018–1, and contributed to the CNPq research ‘Geodesign and parametric modeling of territorial occupation: Geoprocessing for a proposal for a Master Landscape Plan for the Quadrilátero Ferrífero-MG Region’, Process 401066/2016–9, Edital Universal 01/2016.
This work is also supported from Operational Programme Research, Development and Education—Project “Postdoc2MUNI” (No. CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/18_053/0016952).
We thank the Safe Software Grant Program for making the FME software available for the development of the game.
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de Sena, Í.S., Poplin, A., de Andrade, B. (2021). GeoMinasCraft: A Serious Geogame for Geographical Visualization and Exploration. In: Geertman, S.C.M., Pettit, C., Goodspeed, R., Staffans, A. (eds) Urban Informatics and Future Cities. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76059-5_30
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