Scavenger Hunt: Utilization of Blockchain and IoT for a Location-Based Game

Distributed Ledger Technology, has been gaining enormous attention in areas beyond cryptocurrency. Industries such as energy, transportation, and healthcare are already integrating DLTs into their operations. On the other hand, recent advances and the increasing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are also enabling new and exciting ways of interaction and sensing for mobile device users. Mobile gaming is another prominent industry that can be benefited from these technological developments and has the potential to create business opportunities. In this paper, we explore the uses of Distributed Ledger Technology in Mobile Gaming and for this purpose, we have taken a location-based IoT mobile gaming use case and propose new gaming features for the players by the addition of the DLT. We propose a platform for creating and playing scavenger hunt games using low-power BLE beacons. It allows smartphones to interact with the predetermined real-world locations and players can observe the surrounding environment looking for clues in the game. At the end of a hunt, the player receives rewards that are stored on a distributed ledger as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and can bring in-game advantages for the next hunts. The proposed system is implemented using off-the-shelf devices and IoT beacons. We implemented our hybrid architecture by using AWS Lambda, Hyperledger Fabric managed blockchain and DynamoDB. We performed multiple experiments measuring the time taken for the end-to-end process, IoT beacon response times and the throughput of the Fabric network. Using the performance results, we estimated the maximum number of active players that can be supported by the game. Finally, we discuss business opportunities and limitations of the proposed proof of concept.