VideoGames

'Enhancing and increasing the gaming experiences in card games' project

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An intriguing project: Enhancing and increasing the gaming experiences in card games by Johan Ohlsson and Per Hjalmarsson (Trans-Reality Game Laboratory):

The primary focus is to find out how computer technology can offer new and unique possibilities, rather than just replacing existing mechanisms in traditional card games. The project takes an analysis of existing card games and gaming mechanisms as a starting point (such as for example the game Magic the Gathering), in order to create new game ideas. The idea is to develop two diametrical different card games in order to approach the question at issue. TRGL and Chalmers will act as a creative partner and tutor for the project, as well as contribute with technology, but the project itself will be carried out by the students. The project will be disseminated in new playable games as well as a paper.

I am expecting something interesting and curious from this.

Relationship between game space and 'real'

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John Paul Bichard works on the relationship between game space and the 'real' as he says there.

I explore evidence spaces where generic game style scenes are recreated as real crime scenes; an in-game photoshoot of crime scenes in max Payne 2 and now in my research in a project with the Interactive Institute that sets out to develop games in the everyday environment

The project is described here What if you could play a videogame that was 'within' the real world - if the objects surrounding you had hidden meanings, stories and relationships that went beyond their own history and purpose, beyond their everyday existence. What if you could play with everything, leave in-game objects wherever you wanted, enter game spaces through 'real' doorways, search your surroundings for the traces of someone else's gaming adventures.

I like this example he takes:

...you have been driving the same way for the past 4 days so you know all about the mean old guy at the petrol station who won't talk to you. Come to think of it, every gas station attendant seems to be hiding something - what if they are all in league with each other... what are they trying to hide? How do you get any of them to talk? Do they know anything about how Mrs Lundberg disappeared? You know that someone was seen near the railway bridge. What if you searched the bottom of the riverbed beneath the bridge, using the aqualung you picked up from the last village... Not today, as the car turns before the bridge, you're going a different way into town. You see a phone box coming up on the right... the phone rings!!! ... pointing your device at the phone, you answer it. A woman's voice tells you quietly and deliberately that the person sitting in the back seat of the car in front is the detective searching for you... time to put on the sunglasses you found last week at the bus stop and what about changing into in the clothes that are sitting in a pile on the floor of the phone box...

Computer-Supported Collaborative PLAY

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Also mentioned by Philip's great blog, Bill Gaver will give a keynote talk which I find relevant at ECSCW:

All W and No P Makes CSCW a Dull Field: 
Supporting Ludic Collaboration by William Gaver (Royal College of Art, London, UK)

CSCW was built on the recognition that work is inherently collaborative. But that doesn’t mean that all collaborations involve work. We also join together to play — and not just at games, but at life more generally. We engage in desultory conversations, gossip, and flirtations, we pursue humorous speculation and casual role-play. Ludic activities such as these are motivated by intrinsic pleasure rather than any particular outcome. But playful interactions do have benefits. They allow us to explore new perspectives, negotiate shared orientations, maintain emotional bonds, and set new directions. Play is important for our lives, and this includes our working lives as well as our private ones. Focusing collaborative technologies too narrowly on work risks missing the benefits of more playful forms of collaboration. The problem is that CSCW, like most domains of HCI, tends to understand successful systems in terms of clear usability and utility, while play is by definition is less well defined and more open to appropriation and interpretation. In this talk, I discuss a number of examples of systems that support “computer supported collaborative playfulness”. Equally importantly, I discuss how embracing ludic activities changes our assumptions about interactive systems, and discuss approaches to designing for and evaluating ludic technologies.

Why do I blog this? that's definitely a claim I agree with, especially because I find this interesting as a researcher and also because I work on project about collaboration and games for companies (there seems to be a lack of applied research in those companies to create guidelines/model/use cases/... for that matter). Besides, CSCW is not just focused on work since there is new emerging field about Computer Supported Collaborative Learning which is already very active for 10 years.

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Airkanoid: Physical Proximity in Mixed Reality Entertainment Applications

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AirKanoid – Visual Presentation vs. Physical Proximity in Mixed Reality Entertainment Applications by Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath, Martin Faust, Hartmut Rosch.

A pervasive game like AirKanoid (see Figure 1) gets the game out of the computer and in direct contact with the players by combining the best of two worlds: Flexible and variable representation of the game from the virtual world, and unrestricted bodily movement and physical challenge for the players from the actual world. (...) AirKanoid is a MR remake of Taito's classic Arkanoid game1 (see Figure 3). Other games in this tradition are Atari's Breakout, and Pong. AirKanoid takes over the main game concept of bricks and paddles and adapts it to a more general and natural way of interaction. The main difference is the use of our graspable AirBats as interfaces for controlling the paddles.

Why do I blog this? the idea is funny, and the paper describes an interesting evaluation, relying on various indexes (performance, ease of play, awareness, experience, place).

VisaVis

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Already blogged everywhere VisAVis games is a good way to move forward from the actual video game paradigm to new interfaces. It's carried out by Julian Bleecker and game designer Peter Brinson.

Vis-a-Vis represents a research vector along an old familiar trajectory of location-based designs, but adding a relatively new (for me) element of gaming. 
We've cobbled together a mobile gaming framework composed of light-weight, outdoor viewable TabletPCs, the Torque available source game engine, a global positioning system (GPS), a mil-spec 3D sensor that's able to very quickly and accurately measure where one points the TabletPC, turning the whole rig into a kind of "magic window" into the game world. 

While the technical framework might be considered unique, maybe even clever, it's really the games that have us hopped up. We're working through an exciting list of game concepts that are off the hook when it comes to what one may traditionally think of as an electronic game. We're hitting the canon of "traditional" outdoor kids games, making them fun, engaging, and hopefully a great reason to get outside and break a sweat. 

Vis-a-Vis Games takes ordinary electronic gaming off your old fashioned video game console and desktop PC and moves it out into the real world. This is the future of electronic gaming - pervasive, ubiquitous, in-the-world experiences. Imagine the heart-pumping action of your favorite FPS - in the real world! Or an old favorite playground game like Dodgeball, networked with other players both nearby and far away, where you actually have to move to dodge the ball! Or a role-playing game where you have to travel across town or across the country!) to pursue your characters goals!

Why do i blog this? I like the project very much. The 'VisAVis' framework is very appealing to me, it reminds me the "Behind the mirror" novel by Lewis Caroll with this idea of a "magic window". I envision lots of interesting scenarios both for pleasure/fun and educational purposes (even though it does not seem to be the focus of the project, it made me think about potential scenarios for children).

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Computers in Entertainment new issue

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The last issue of ACM's Computers in Entertainment is finally released (a july issue released in august :) ). It has a very insightful section about pervasive gaming. Here are authors and titles:

    Â Â Â Â

  • Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world by Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, Trond Nilsen
  • The Drop: pragmatic problems in the design of a compelling, pervasive game by Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Anthony LaMarca

  • Albert in Africa: online role-playing and lessons from improvisational theatre by Ken Newman
  • Sports over a distance by Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Stefan Agamanolis
  • Atomic actions -- molecular experience: theory of pervasive gaming by Bo Kampmann Walther

Why do I blog this? even though this is not an exhaustive review of what is going around in pervasive gaming, the section is very relevant. I found the first paper as the most interesting since it gives a pertinent overview of the field ranging from "smart toys, affective games, tabletop games, location-aware games, and augmented reality games". I really like Trond Nilsen's work (already explained here9 as well as what Adrian David Cheok does at his lab in Singapour.

Besides, there are also 2 papers I found interesting, the one by Nicolas Duchenaut I already blogged about as well as another one that concerns a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games by Penelope Sweetser, Peta Wyeth (which I found relevant for my work with video-game companies)

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Cognition & Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

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!Holiday post! (via), Constance Steinkuehler has published her phd dissertation entitled Cognition & Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach. I just skimmed through the document bu I am looking forward to read it more carefully. Here is how she describes her research:

My research investigates the forms of learning, thinking, and socially interacting that MMOGs recruit from those who play. My dissertation (currently in progress) is an online cognitive ethnography of MMOGs that characterizes the emergent culture of MMOGaming and how participation is constituted through language and practice both within the game (e.g., virtual social interaction & joint activity) and beyond (e.g., the creation of fan fiction & websites). What does it mean to be literate in this social space? How does one become a member of this community? And what import does participation have for the (on- and off-screen) identities of its members?

Why do I blog this? I an really interested in hearing more about research in MMORPG and how it relates to socio-cognitive issues.

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How to prevent bot from playing online games

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Yes that's a crux issue! Spam is already a tremendous problem for websites and bloggers but would video games be the next focus of spammer/bots? That's a topic tackled in "Preventing bots from playing online games." by Golle and Ducheneaut in the next issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment:

Preventing Bots From Playing Online Games : As multiplayer online gaming gains in economic and social importance, an increasingly large number of players is beginning to rely on bots (automated player agents) to gain unfair advantages in games. In this article we study the problem of restricting participation in online games to human players so they can enjoy the game without interference from the bots. We propose two broad approaches to prevent bots from playing online games. The first consists of seamlessly integrating software-based tests (known as reverse Turing tests or CAPTCHA tests) into online games to tell humans and computers apart. Our second contribution is to propose hardware instantiations of CAPTCHA tests. Our techniques are applicable in a wide variety of online games, from poker to “shoot’em ups.” They are cost-effective, immune to cheating, and preserve the human players’ enjoyment of each game. We conclude with a discussion of how approaches to deter the use of bots may complement our techniques to detect bots.

Why do I blog this? this kind of phenomenon is amazing, video game designers will now have to take bots into account while creating their stuff! Besides, I really like what this Nicolas Ducheneaut guy does at his lab; I like what they do/wrote.

Scotland Yard Mobile Game

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Live Action Scotland Yard (L.A.S.Y.) is a game created by Canadian designer Joel Friesen. The scenario is pretty simple: a 'Mr X' dresses in a bright yellow t-shirt, and then takes to the public transport systems of Toronto, Canada, pursued by three more people, 'detectives', in red shirts. The 'criminal' has to give clues to those chasing every third stop he makes.

One guy named Mr. X runs around Toronto’s transit system in a bright yellow shirt, while three or more guys in red shirts try to find him using the clues he gives at every third stop he makes. The three detectives are coordinated by dispatchers who tell the detectives where they think Mr. X might be and how best to block him off. Mr.X’s dispatcher is relaying information about the detectives whereabouts and tries to keep him away from them. The game ends when a time limit has been reached or X is caught.

You need:


  • A fully charged Cell phone with unlimited weekend minutes

    • 


  • A Monthly or Day Pass for the TTC

    • 


  • Sunscreen



Here are the rules: Scotland Yard is played by 6 or more people, half of the players are in the field, and the other half are dispatchers. Teams are paired up, one dispatcher with a field agent. Each pair is in contact with each other using a cell phone. One agent in the field is chosen to be “Mr. X” while the rest are detectives. (...) More about the rules here

Why do I blog this it's somehow like a hide-and-seek/treasure hunt/first-person shooter with a bit of technological flavor (a cell phone). I do think this sort of game is ten times more funny than crappy mobile games already on the market. In this context, the technology is just used to 'support' coordination among teams. This is exactly the kind of situation I would like to study (comparing for instance situations with location-awareness tool and situations without). It's cheap, doable, what if we do something like this on the EPFL campus????

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Foot-based controller without external sensors

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Thanks chris for pointing me on this Sensing Gamepad developed at the Interaction Laboratory (Sony CSL) by Jun Rekimoto:Electrostatic Potential Sensing for Enhancing Entertainment Oriented Interactions

This project introduces a novel way to enhance input devices to sense a user's foot motion. By measuring the electrostatic potential of a user, this device can sense the user's footsteps and jumps without requiring any external sensors such as a floor mat or sensors embedded in shoes. We apply this sensing principle to the gamepad to explore a new class of game interactions that combine the player's physical motion with gamepad manipulations. We are also investigating other possible input devices that can be enhanced by the proposed sensing architecture such as a portable music player that can sense foot motion through the headphone and musical instruments that can be affected by the players' motion.

Why do I blog this? it's great to have such an innnovation, allowing your to control games with your feet, without a foot sensor.

Game/Level Design Analysis

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My colleague Pascal Luban founder of the Game Design Studio just released a new description of his companies methods.

The Game Design Studio is a consulting firm whose mission is to support its clients in the video game industry in designing their games.

Our objective is to support our clients in creating their own design, not to do the game design for them. To accomplish this, we bring a complete range of services that are tailored to bring the very specific know-how required at any moment during the design phase of a game: definition of the concept, game design doctoring or coaching, work on gameplay mechanisms, script writing, level design, etc.

Why do I blog this? what is interesting here (with regards to my interests) is the tool Pascal developed to analyse games. For instance, the methods he set up for level design analysis is very relevant. I like the visualizations he worked out, for instance to depicts how players del with difficulty throughout the levels (picture on the left) or how to adapting the pace of the level to the game genre (picture on the right): He used it to analyse existing games like Crash Bandicoot, the following example Pascal shows is the difficulty analysis for the second level of Crash Bandicoot 2: According to him, judging on this graph, "a trend clearly appears. The game is moderately difficult for the first half then offers two major challenges followed by a cool down period. This is probably not the result of luck but rather a well-thought level design strategy.". I think this sort of tools are very relevant; however I envision lots of ways to move forward, especially through user testing and data-analysis, which is somehow something I am working on (with our work about mobile games here at the lab for instance).

Research journal about MMORPG?

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There is currently on Terra Nova a very relevant discussion about having or not a peer-reviewed journal about MMORPG studies (started by Constance Steinkuehler).

Am I naive in thinking that we exist as a field? If we do, where do we send our students to read through the literature? So far, I've treated Terra Nova as a sort of repository of ideas. But this will not easily sustain us as more scholars join the field. So... I wonder. Is it time we publish a journal of our own? Or at least a yearly review of some form? I worry that knowledge gets lost as generations move on to other topics/activities and newcomers will see nothing but a whole lot of webtalk without much scholarly, peer-reviewed writing on the issues.

And, yes, it does matter. If academensian's (pun intended) are to take virtual worlds seriously, then we have to give them reason to do so. R. Bartle, you question why it is that MMOG's are constantly translated into the home fields of those who write on them. Well, without a defined audience of our own that proves itself legitimate, we risk becoming nothing more than a fandom community around a technology that will, itself, grow tired, as all eventually do.

So, my questions include: Are we ready for a peer-reviewed journal on MMOGs? And, if so, who exactly ought to serve as peer review? And too, would we be "selling out" or whatever to establish such a forum for paper publication? And could we create one that worked in conjunction with the lively discussions here?

Why do I blog this? I think it's a very pertinent issue but I see few problems. Apart from the feasibility (running a journal has a cost, even an online one), there would be some concerns related to the multi-disciplinary aspects of this project. I cannot imagine a journal about games focused on jsut one discipline. Then arises issues derived from the multi-disciplinary aspects of the projects. Since video games are recent "research objects", there is no consensus yet about how it shoudl be treated. Actually there are different opinions depending on disciplines, How can we take them into acocunt. For instance, HCI, media studies or 'user experience' fields are already taking video games very seriously which is not the case of cognitive pschology for which the debate is still lively. And it's event worse in other fields. Let's see what happen, but I'll be very interesed in a journal about the 'user experience' of MMORPG with regards to cognition, social aspects, user experience and interactivity, that's for sure

Game Controller Family Tree

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Sock Master's Game Console Controller Family Tree offers an interesting classification of game controllers based on a family tree:

How did the current home-console controllers come to be? How have they evolved? You may have noticed some similarities between the current generation controllers, or between them and the previous generations of controllers. So, how do they all tie together?

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to analyse design in terms of family tree and potential proximity between old and brand-new artifacts. This longitudinal view however shows an important stability of game controllers. Of course, some are missing.

Augmented Reality Kung-Fu

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Kick Ass Kung-Fu is "an immersive game installation that transforms computer gaming into a visual, physical performance like dance or sports. You can fight and defy gravity like kung-fu movie actors - only there's no wires or post-production needed, thanks to the real-time embodied interaction and virtual set technology.".

# Control the game with your own movements - actually, it's your own figure in the play! # Total freedom to move, jump and kick - no wires needed! # Perform film style gigantic leaps - you are not constrained by real world physics! # Computer vision technology analyzes the power of impacts and damage. The technology works with any number of simultaneous players and with weapons such as swords and nunchakus. # Use your voice and special poses for devastating chi-energy attacks.

The status of spectators in video games

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Jutst stumbled across this document: Supporting Spectators in Video-Games by Ashwin R. Bharambe (Carnegie Mellon University), Venkata N. Padmanabhan (Microsoft Research) Srinivasan Seshan (Carnegie Mellon University). It's about the technical feasibility of including spectators in multi-player games.

Spectator-mode gaming, or spectating, has emerged as a popular paradigm for online multiplayer gaming. Spectating allows users to watch the proceedings of an online game akin to how television allows people to watch real-world games and sports. be natural to deliver their cheers only to the players that they are viewing.

We examine network support for spectators in online multi-player games. We consider how the associated challenges are different from those in traditional audio/video streaming. Specifically, we consider two problems: spectating (distributing the gaming stream reliably to spectators, who may outnumber the players by several orders of magnitude) and cheering (delivering the spectators’ audio cheers to the players as well as to other spectators). We point out the many unique challenges and opportunities for optimization that arise in this context in terms of resilience, bandwidth adaptation, and dynamically varying user interest. We outline a solution based on overlay networking and quantify some of our design arguments with a preliminary evaluation of Quake III, a popular first-person shooting game.

Why do I blog this? I think we have an indicator of a new pattern here in video games: there is another video-game experience, that is to say watching what others do in the game world. For instance warcraftmovies or hacprod allows people to watch video of games (captured with software like fraps as reported here). There is also a relevant distinction between in-game spectators (as described in the paper quoted above) and people present in the same room of the player, sharing cues and tips (I've attended a talk about this at Playing with the future but I cannot find out who is the author)

Now the question is how will this be reflected into future game design? how game designers would take that into account?

DIGRA conference summary

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For morons like me who missed the DIGRA conference, there is a short wrap-up on Gamasutra.

Last week DiGRA, the Digital Games Researchers Association, hit Vancouver for its second bi-annual gathering. (...) Games Researchers are predominantly academics with the odd hybrid professional /journalist/something-or-other who engage in Games Studies. Now, the exact definition of Games Studies is still a hotly debated topic (cf. bar talk above; or for a more sober discussion Espen Aarseth's Computer Game Studies, Year One) but at its core, games studies is the analysis of video games, gamers, and game culture from the perspective of social sciences such as psychology, sociology, communications studies, as well as my own field, philosophy. At the fringes, Games Studies embraces issues such as the process of game design but is very unlikely to be concerned with path-finding algorithms or triangle meshing techniques. Having said this, in my experience, most Games Researchers are fairly hardcore gamers and a few got tech. (...) To close, I want to make sure that I have not left any non-academic with the wrong impression of DiGRA. There is a lot of content that is applicable to the business of computer games, but the conference has not turned into an academic/industry lovefest. Industry participation is very low, lower that I think it should be, and seemingly esoteric content is high.

Why do I blog this? I think DIGRA events are interesting steps into game research. What strikes me is that it's a very large community with unbalanced representation of disciplines.

Possible patent for a next Nintendo console pad

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Some folks are wondering whether this patent is for the next Nintendo Console "Revolution" (others think it's for the next gameboy).

United States Patent 6,908,388 Shimizu , et al. June 21, 2005 Game system with tilt sensor and game program including viewpoint direction changing feature

Abstract: A game system displaying a three-dimensional game space on a display includes a housing held by a player, a tilt sensor provided on the housing, a viewpoint coordinates determination mechanism for determining viewpoint coordinates in accordance with an output value of the tilt sensor, and a game image generation processing mechanism for generating a game image based on the viewpoint coordinates determined by the viewpoint coordinates determination mechanism. The game system allows the player to feel as if the three-dimensional game space is tilted in accordance with a tilt of a game device, etc., with a minimal processing burden.

Inventors: Shimizu; Takao (Kyoto, JP); Suzuki; Toshiaki (Kyoto, JP) Assignee: Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Kyoto, JP) Appl. No.: 440111 Filed: May 19, 2003

No pictures :( Connected pasta: I already blogged about it here, arguing about possible features.

It might be a fake...

eBook reader turned into a Game platform

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Dave5 sent me his new project which I found very nice: The Librie as a games machine. The point of the project is to turn an electronic book reader (not a generic computing platform as he points) into a game platform. The trickiest part is to design stuff with the constraints of the device (which is obviously something appealing for engineers and hackers as fab describes).

Dave designed applications like this chess board or Ludo. It's basically a 'universal game board', the designer wanted to investigate how it could be used as a RPGmap display.

Here's what Dave envisions to move away from the eBook reader thing thanks to 4 dimensions:

  1. A greater display area
  2. An ability for the display to know about the pieces placed on it... their type, position and their orientation
  3. A system that allows you to take the information about the pieces and alter the image displayed on the surface
  4. A network connection.

Then this could be used to support news "dimensions to card games like Pokemon and Magic the Gathering" adding RFID tags to the pieces. Let's wait a bit to see what Dave will do in the near future :)

Taking advantage of camera phones to design mobile games

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Camblaster, here is how the website describes it:

Shoot at flying targets through the camera! Move the phone away and discover swarms of new targets to shoot! Come back, and see the previous targets still flying in the same zone! CamBlaster!™ creates a new gaming experience because it uniquely integrates the reality seen through the camera into the classic fun of a great shooter game. Designed to be embedded into handsets or downloaded from premium content & application services, CamBlaster! is targeted at camera phone vendors and manufacturers, mobile carriers and content providers.

Why do I blog this? What I found interesting with this game is not the scenario but instead, the fact that it takes advantage of a feature of the phone to engage the user in a novel interaction. Game designers being to notice that the mobile game experience can be something else than just a gameboy-like scenario. The use of peculiar mobile phone features (voice, camera, geolocation...) is a way to move forward. Connected pasta: this post tackled this issue, with an emphasis of the technical feasability.

Update (via): Besides, a related project is eyemobile. This is the company that developed the technology underlying the Sony EyeToy (demo here):

The Cell Phone Becomes a Joystick: EyeMobile software uses the cell phone's camera to “lock" to images of physical objects in the environment (for example a dark or a light tile on the floor). As the phone is tilted, that objects position in the camera view moves. EyeMobile then deduces how much, how fast and which direction a user is tilting or otherwise moving the phone. Basically, it turns the phone into a joystick.