Wikipedia mapping
September 12, 2009 by pekuja · 2 Comments
Click for full resolution.
Mini Ludum Dare 12 is on, and the theme is Wikipedia/Mediawiki, the idea being to download content for your game from a wiki. I thought about it, and I didn’t want to make an overly text based game, and I thought images on Wikipedia would be hard to use well. What I’ve come up with now is to make a map based on the links between different pages. In the picture above, I’ve taken the Wikipedia page about Cave Story, followed all the links, and then found all the connections between those pages. Cave Story itself is not included because everything would be connected to it and it just looks messy. The graph visualization is courtesy of Graphviz. I’m not quite sure yet how I will manage a similar visual representation of the connections in-game.
Awesome! If you get this tool finished I’d love to use it to generate visuals for after someone has played a game of Wikipedia tag. What is that you may ask?
Back in July of this year I got to help develop and playtest a non-computer tag game that uses Wikipedia as the play space. The games are a lot of fun and I’ve always wondered about how it might look to map out the games after they are over.
More info on <a href="http://hybridmind.com/games/wikipedian-tag/"Wikipedian Tag over here on my blog entry for it.
I’ll be interested to see how your entry progresses!
Well the actual visuals here are generated with Graphviz: http://www.graphviz.org/
It’s very simple to use. All I did here was basically use the Mediawiki API to download the pages from Wikipedia and then write the link structure into a Graphviz compatible DOT-file.