Games that design themselves

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/games-design-themselves

Can we teach computers to co-construct in the way that people do? MIT Media Lab think so.

Playstation 3 controller

This is the sort of thing that exemplifies why I started a blog.

Kotaku reported on a homebrew PS3 controller for a gamer who has a disability.

Here is the inventor/user’s (KitsuneNoYume) post on the Playstation forums. KitsuneNoYume uses 16 switches simultaneously. These are all wired to a circuit board culled from a Playstation controller.

The device was designed by KitsuneNoYume himself and assembled by Mark Felling of GimpGear.

This rig runs a Playstation 3

The whole rig in use

Adapted controllers for video games. That’s new, right?

Not really, check out this 1989 ad for a controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

NES Hands Free Controller

Chin joystick with sip and puff for A, B, Select, and Start. I’ve seen one of these in real life used by probably the most hardcore Tetris player I’ve ever met.

Funny that Nintendo hasn’t used their new-found interest in unconventional controllers to make the Wii more accessible.

Blurry lines 3

Huddle

Are these children playing football, or pretending to play football?

Nicole Lazzaro and the 4 Types of Fun

Nicole Lazzaro is a game designer and founder/CEO of XEODesign. This is a research firm that tests video games (electronic interactive entertainment is the term they use) for player experience.

Unfortunately, her research isn’t published anywhere. And while I appreciate that there is much better money to be made in mercenary science than in academic publishing, it sounds like she is working on the same sorts of things that I’ve been thinking about with play design so I wish I could read it. (I also wonder if she’s hiring.)

Specifically, she has a conceptual model for “4 Types of Fun” and a way of categorizing games more precisely than Piaget. Read on for the model…

Blurry lines part deux

A game is play with rules.

Can you name a type of play without rules?

I think there might not be.

Blurry lines

The creators of Magic the Gathering, a fantasy card game, have a scale known as the Melvin-Vorthos axis. Magic is set in a universe of epic fantasy. Game cards have painted illustrations, quotes and identities that fit into a storyline. This story material is referred to as “flavor” and has no actual impact on gameplay, which involves complex strategy with a heavy mathematical component.

Melvin and Vorthos are demographic profiles given to describe the player-base for marketing purposes. Melvin thinks of the game as a straight mathematical exercise in pure abstraction; his play would be unchanged if the cards contained no illustrations or story element at all. Vorthos plays the game for the pretend epic-fantasy elements; he would enjoy the cards without the game rules and statistics. Most players fall somewhere in between these extremes and enjoy both to greater or lesser degrees. What is interesting (and frustrating) is that occasionally, players on opposite ends of the spectrum play each other and have a miscommunication because it turns out they are playing two completely different games… together.

Rahr! My cards eats you!

All of play falls onto the Melvin-Vorthos axis. Some games reflect reality and some are pure abstraction, with levels of gradation in between. Also, some games cover more of the spectrum than others. Magic covers a wide swath of the abstraction spectrum, while games such as cops-and-robbers or roulette take up a much narrower sliver.

Electronic entertainment 2

Last post I talked about the video game Rez and how the gameplay was highly dependent on audio and tactile feedback.

Physics engines in games have been getting increasingly realistic. There are millions of calculations per second in a modern PS3 or XBox360 game devoted to how things fall, bounce and scatter. Furthermore, most computers and game consoles now have a second whole processor devoted to calculating how light from specific sources in the game bounces off things and scatters.

Has anyone devoted this much attention to in-game sound physics?

With 5.1 surround audio, the possibility of a game having realistic doppler and echo effects would be highly immersive and make the sound-based gameplay I was talking about before possible. I know some games use doppler, but I don’t think it is calculated realistically on the fly and I don’t think anyone is simulating realistic echo.

Could such a game be used in therapy as a VR training method for teaching that clicking technique thatBen Underwood uses?

Electronic entertainment and blindness

Anyone used the new iPod Nano yet? They’ve added some accessibility features to the 4th gen Nano and iTunes 8. They’ve also added captioning support for movies. (Although I question the usefulness of captions on the Nano. Notice they don’t include a screenshot.)

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/itunes/vision.html

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/itunes/physical.html

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/itunes/hearing.html

http://www.bostonherald.com/jobfind/news/technology/view/2008_09_26_Apple_makes_iTunes_more_accessible_for_the_blind/

http://www.bostonherald.com/jobfind/news/technology/view.bg?articleid=1121806

Read on for some more ideas for other electronic entertainment ideas.

How would I create an adaptation to video games for a blind player?

Games

I watched two small girls playing on campus today outside the Creamery. While they ate their ice cream, they played a game where every time a bus would come by, they would race to see who could read out the number on the side of it first. If they said it at the same time, there was apparently some sort of “jinx” involved. They did this for quite a while– at least ten minutes.

CATA bus

No grown-up would invent such a game. It is too… frivolous. And in some ways, too obvious.
The thing that I found so fascinating about it was that the rules to this game seemed to spring up spontaneously, out of thin air. One second they were eating ice cream and the next second, “EIGHTY-EIGHT! Jinx!”

What access to metaplay communication do AAC kids have? How do we increase their ability to regulate the flow of play scenarios and games they find themselves in? Especially given the fact that we cannot anticipate the rules of games that occur spontaneously.