So what do I mean by an accessible game? A quick survey of web sites that claim to cover accessible gaming focus on the notion of visual accessibility, or the extent to which an unsighted person or person with a poor vision will be able to engage with a game. However, creating accessible games also extends to games that are appropriate for gamers who are hard of hearing (audio cues are okay, but they should not be the sole way of communicating something important to the player); gamers who have a physical disability that makes it hard for the player to use a particular input device (whether that’s a keyboard and mouse, gamepad, Wiimote controller, or whatever.); and gamers who have a learning disability or, age or trauma related cognitive impairment.

The Game Accessibility website provides the following breakdown of accessible games and the broad strategies for making them accessible:

- Gaming with a visual disability: “In the early days of video gaming visually disabled gamers hardly encountered any accessibility problems. Games consisted primarily of text and therefore very accessible for assistive technologies. When the graphical capabilities in games grew, the use of text was reduced and ‘computer games’ transformed into ‘video games’, eventually making the majority of mainstream computer games completely inaccessible. The games played nowadays by gamers with a visual disability can be categorized by 1) games not specifically designed to be accessible (text-based games and video games) and 2) games specifically designed to be accessible (audio games, video games that are accessible by original design and video games made accessible by modification).” Accessible games in this category include text based games and audio games, “that consists of sound and have only auditory (so no visual) output. Audio games are not specifically “games for the blind”. But since one does not need vision to be able to play audio games, most audio games are developed by and for the blind community.”.
- Gaming with a hearing disability: “In the early days of video gaming, auditory disabled gamers hardly encountered any accessibility problems. Games consisted primarily of text and graphics and had very limited audio capabilities. While the audio capabilities in games grew, the use of text was reduced. … The easiest way to provide accessibility is to add so-called “closed-captions” for all auditory information. This allows deaf gamers to obtain the information and meaning of, for instance, dialog and sound effects.”
- Gaming with a physical disability: “There are several games that can be played by people with a physical disability. … For gamers with a severe physical disability the number of controls might be limited to just one or two buttons. There are games specifically designed to be played with just one button. These games are often referred to as “one-switch”-games or “single-switch”-games.”
- Gaming with a learning disability: “In order to get a good understanding of the needs of gamers with a learning disability, it is important to identify the many different types of learning disabilities [and] know that learning disabilities come in many degrees of severeness. … Learning disabilities include (but are not limited to): literacy difficulty (Dyslexia), Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD) or Dyspraxia, handwriting difficulty (sometimes known as Dysgraphia), specific difficulty with mathematics (sometimes known as Dyscalculia), speech language and communication difficulty (Specific Language Impairment), Central Auditory Processing Disorder(CAPD), Autism or Aspergers syndrome, Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADD or ADHD) and memory difficulties. … The majority of mainstream video games are playable by gamers with learning disabilities. … Due to the limited controls one switch games are not only very accessible for gamers with limited physical abilities, but often very easy to understand and play for gamers with a learning disability.”

Generally then, accessible games may either rely on modifications or extensions to a particular game that offers players alternative ways of engaging with the game (for example, closed captions to provide an alternative to spoken word instructions), or they may have been designed with a particular constituency or modality in mind (for example, an audio game or game that responds well to a one-click control). It might also be that accessible games can be designed to suit a range of accessibility requirements (for example, an audio, text-based game with a simple or one-click control).

In the next post, I’ll focus on one class of games in particular – audio games.

In this short series of posts, I’ll repeat some of the other Game Maker tutorials using GML. So if you’ve ever fancied trying your hand at writing actual programme code, why not give this a try…?:-) Note that this series assumes some familiarity with writing games the visual way in Game Maker.

To start with, I’m going to replicate the “Catch a Clown” game described the introductory Game Maker tutorial.

The approach I’ll take is to write a series of series of GML scripts that can be attached to events associated with game objects, Setting up the game objects and events needs to be done using the visual editor (at least until I can figure out how, or if, we can write scripts to set up objects and rooms directly!)

To use Game Maker Language scripts, you’ll need to run Game Maker in its Advanced mode (set it from the File menu). Scripts can then be created from the toolbar, or from contextual menu raised by right clicking on the scripts folder in the left hand sidebar palette.

To begin with, we’re going to recreate the a single room game, with wall elements round the edges, and a clown that bounces around inside the room. The aim of the game is to splat the clown by clicking on it.

As I’m teaching myself GML too, will start by learning how to attach scripted events to the game objects. TO start with, you’ll need to:

- create a room;
- create a wall object with a solid wall sprite;
- create a clown object with a transparent clown sprite;
- put wall objects round the edge of the room;
- pop a clown object somewhere in the middle of the room.

To get things moving, we’re going to create a script that will set an instance of the clown object moving when it is created with speed 4 in a random direction.

Create a new script from the toolbar or scripts resource folder; double click on the new script to raise the script editor. In the Name textbox in the status bar at the top of the script editor, give your script a name. For convenience, you might prfix it with scr_. I’m going to call my first script scr_moveAny.

When writing a script, there are certain syntactic conventions we need to be aware of. Firstly, programme code nees to be contained within curly braces: { }

Secondly, separate lines of code need to end with a semicolon – ;

So how do we go about writing a GML programme. GML has a wealth of predefined functions, which are all described in the Game Maker Help menu. But as novices, we donlt know what any of those functions are, or what they do. So let’s start to build up our knowledge somehow.

Before we get into the code, remember this: writing programming code is not what programming is about. Progrtamming is working out the things you need to tell the computer to do so that the programme does what you want. Writing the code is just that – taking the programme, an coding it in a particular way. You can write your programme – the list of things you want the computer to do – anywhere. I often doodle outlines for the programmes I want to write on scraps of paper. Having worked out the programme, we can then write the code.

So what programme are we going to write for starters? Well, when the clown object is created, we need it to start moving in a random direction with a specified speed.

Looking through the GML help file manual, in the Moving Around section, I noticed a function called motion_set(dir,speed) which Sets the motion with the given speed in direction dir.

Hmm… okay, so my programme code might look something like:

{
motion_set(dir,4);
}

So if I attach this script to the clown’s Create event, it should start to move in direction dir with speed 4. But what’s dir? Digging around a little bit more, it’s a direction given in degrees. So to move randomly, I need to set dir to a random number between 0 and 359). I know a bit about other programming languages, so I guess there’s a probably a “random” function… and there is: random(N) which returns a random real number (i.e. it might have lots of bits after the decimal point) between 0 and N.

To get a whole number (known as an integer) we can put the random() function inside another function, called floor(M), which rounds the number, M, contained in the brackets down to the nearest whole number. That is, if we write:

floor(random(360))

the random(360) function will return a random number between 0 and 360 (such as 124.9734), and the floor function will round it down to the nearest whole number (in this example, 124).

Great – so we can get a direction angle for our motion_set() command. We could just replace the dir term in the motion_set function with the floor(random(360)) expression, or we could use a variable. A variable is like a container we can use to represent a (possibly changing) value. In GML, we need to declare a variable before we use it with as follows:

var dir;

var is a special reserved word that tells Game Maker the next word is the name of a variable, in the above case, dir. We can then set the dir variable to a numerical value:
var dir;
dir=floor(random(360));

The whole script looks like this:

{
var dir;
dir=floor(random(360));
motion_set(dir,4);
}

You can check that the code is “correct” in a syntactical sense (i.e. you can check you’ve got the brackets and punctuation right, if not the logic) by clicking on the 1010 button (“check the script for syntax errors”).

If you save the script, we’re now in a poistion to attach it to the clown object. Open the clown object window, add a Create event, and from the control panel on the right hand side, add the “Execute script” action.

Select the clown object and add a Create event. It would be nice if we could configure Game Maker to easily allow us to attach a script to this element more directly, but in Game Maker 7 at least, we need to do this from the control tab on the right hand sidebar palette in the object editor window. The element we’ll be needing is the Execute Script code element:

Select your script from the list of named scripts that are available from the drop down listbox, and attach the desired script to the object itself:

Now play the game. Hopefully, you should see the clown start to move in a random direction at the required speed when the game is started.

So what’s next? If the clown bumps into a wall, we need it to bounce off. We might also want to play a sound as the clown does so. Create a new script, and call it something like scr_wallBounceSound. The function move_bounce_solid(adv) (“Bounces against solid instances, like the corresponding action. adv indicates whether to use advance bounce, that also takes slanted walls into account.”) looks handy. I’m not sure what adv is, but I’m guessing true or false…

Let’s try this:

{
move_bounce_solid(false);
}

Save the script, add a collision event to the clown object that detects a collisions with a wall object, and attach the scr_wallBounceSound script to it. Run the game – hopefully your clown will start to move in a random direction and then bounce off the walls…

Now lets add a sound. Searching for sound in the help file turns up dozens of sound related GML functions, but sound_play(index) looks relevant (“sound_play(index) Plays the indicates sound once. If the sound is background music the current background music is stopped.”). index is the number of the sound file, as ordered in the sounds folder in the resource sidebar, and starting with the index number zero. I have two sounds in ,my game, one for wall bounces, one for when the clown is clicked on, so I choose the approariate one. My script now looks like this:

{
move_bounce_solid(true);
sound_play(0);
}

And finally… In the simplest version of the original game, the idea was to click on the clown to catch it. Catching it has the effect of increasing the score, playing a sound, repositioning the clown to a different location, and setting it moving in a random direction again.

We know how to play the sound and get the character moving, so all we need to figure out is how to increase the score, and move the clown to a new location. In the GML help pages the section on “Score” tells us the name of the variable that is defined by the game to hold the current score: score.

To increase the score by 10, we can write one of two things. Either:
score=score+10;
That is, set the new value of the score to equal the current value of the score, plus 10.

Or we can use the shorthand form: score+=10

To reposition the clown, the help file comes to our rescue again. In the Moving Around section, we find the function move_random(hsnap,vsnap) Moves the instance to a free random, snapped position, like the corresponding action. I think we can just set the hsnap and vsnap values to 0.

So here’s the script that we want to attach to the left-click mouse event on the clown object:

{
score+=10;
sound_play(1);
move_random(0,0);
motion_set(floor(random(360)),4);
}

Okay, I think that’s enough for now… except to look at how we might save and load scripts. In the scripts menu is an option to Export a selected script. The export looks something like this:

#define scr_clickedClown
{
score+=10;
sound_play(1);
move_random(0,0);
motion_set(floor(random(360)),4);
}

It might therefore seem reasonable to suppose we could edit a who range of scripts in a text editor outside of Game Maker and save them in a single text file. Something like this maybe?

#define scr_moveAny
{
var dir;
dir=floor(random(360));
motion_set(dir,4);
}

#define scr_wallBounceSound
{
move_bounce_solid(true);
sound_play(0);
}

#define scr_clickedClown
{
score+=10;
sound_play(1);
move_random(0,0);
motion_set(floor(random(360)),4);
}

And it does indeed seem to work… as long as you save the file as a text file with the suffix .gml

Finally, finally, it’s just worth saying that if you want to leave notes to yourself in a GML programme that are ignored by Game Maker, you can do. They’re called “comments” and you prefix them like this:

// a comment in a programme that is
// ignored by Game Maker;

That is, use double slash… And how are comments typically used? A bit like this:

//script to handle the left-mouseclick event when a clown is clicked on
// this script should be attached to the clown object
#define scr_clickedClown
{
score+=10; // add 10 to the score
sound_play(1); //play the squished sound
move_random(0,0); //move the clown to a new location
motion_set(floor(random(360)),4); //move in a random direction at speed 4
}

That is, we can use the comments as programme code documentation…

Originally authored as an experimental approach to the production of online distance learning materials, many of the resources presented on this blog have also found their into a for credit, formal education course from the UK’s Open University.

If you would like to learn more about the formal course, please visit The Open University website: Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities – A Course from The Open University.

At the time of writing, there is no mandated requirement for online games to display PEGI ratings, even if the games are made specifically for the UK market, although PEGI does have an online scheme – PEGI Online:

The licence to display the PEGI Online Logo is granted by the PEGI Online Administrator to any online gameplay service provider that meets the requirements set out in the PEGI Online Safety Code (POSC). These requirements include the obligation to keep the website free from illegal and offensive content created by users and any undesirable links, as well as measures for the protection of young people and their privacy when engaging in online gameplay.

So how do you decide whether an online game is likely to be appropriate for a younger age range? One way is to ‘trust’ a branded publisher. For example, games appearing on the BBC CBeebies games site are likely to be fine for the youngest of players. And the games on CBBC hit the spot for slightly older children. If you’re not too bothered about product placement and marketing, other trusted brands are likely to include corporates such as Disney, although if you’re a parent, you may prefer games hosted on museum websites, such as Tate Kids or the Science Museum.

But what about a game like following, which is produced by Channel 4 and is intended to act as a ‘public service information’ game about privacy in online social networks?

What sort of cues are there about the intended age range of the players of this game? Are there any barriers or warnings in place to make it difficult to gain access to this game on grounds of age? Should there be? Or is it enough to trust that the design and branding of the site is only likely to appeal to the ‘appropriate’ demographic?

Look through the Smokescreen game website and missions. To what extent is the game: a simulation? a serious game?

How does the visual design of the game compare with the designs for games on the ‘kids’ games sites listed above?

PS if you get a chance to play some of the kids games, well, it is Friday… :-) I have to admit I do like quite a few of the gams on the Science Museum website ;-)

So for the budding digital puppeteers out there, why not wind down this Friday afternoon by having a go at putting together your own digital puppetry performance using xtranormal?

This online application allows you to select a “film set” and then place one or two characters within it. The characters actions can be defined from a palette of predefined actions:

and facial expressions:

Dialogue can also be scripted – simply type in what you want the characters to say, and it will be rendered to speech when the scene is “shot”.

You also have control over the camera position:

To get you started, here’s a quick tutorial:

If you don’t want to start from scratch, you can remix pre-existing films… Here’s one I made earlier, a video to the opening lyrics of a New Model Army song: White Coats.

The following clip shows a brief demo of the application, along with a sales pitch and a quick review of the business model.

Based on the demo pitch and some if the ideas raised in Ad Supported Gaming, how do you think xtranormal might be used as part of an online, interactive or user-engaged advertising campaign?

PS For a large collection of machinima created using the Halo game engine, see Halomovies.org.

At a technical level, what this means is that the game world must always be available – the computer servers that run the game must be online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, keeping the virtual world running. Even when there is no-one in world, there may be elements of the game physics that require some computation to be carried out.

To get an idea of what’s involved in developing the infrastructure that supports a persistent virtual world, read the article Massively multiplayer online games, Part 1: A performance-based approach to sizing infrastructure on the IBM developerWorks website. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all the terminology – the article was written for an audience experienced in the design of large computer systems. There is a still a lot that you can learn from it as a less technical reader. For example, as you read the article, try to answer the following questions:

Phew… you maybe found that quite a challenging exercise? But hopefully a worthwhile one? When reading a document like that, it’s always worth trying to ask yourself questions about what’s being said to further your understanding of it; and if there’s jargon you don’t understand – don’t worry. Try to read the document “for sense” the first time through. You can always go back to the document after looking up the terms you don’t understand, or asking for clarification from someone who may know via your social network…

If you did answer the questions, and maybe even jotted down a few notes, trying writing a blog post (500-1000 words or so – and link back here!;-) to summarise the original article and communicate some of the high level issues and considerations involved in designing the computational infrastructure for an MMOG. And if there’s anything you didn’t understand, try posting a comment back here and then keep an eye on any follow up replies…

In the post Ad-Supported Gaming, I described three different models for using advertising as a way of making computer games pay. In this post, and the ones that follow it in the topic, we’ll consider some of the other business models that support games and gaming, and look at how the distribution models for different sorts of games compares with the distribution of other digital media such as music, movies and even books.

But for now – let’s consider casual games, which in many cases need to (appear to) be “free” to the end-user, or they won’t play them… And if they are being sold, then they need to be affordable (which means they need to be sold in volumes large enough to cover the cost of development and distribution, though not played in such large volumes as if they were purely ad-supported).

The following opinion piece – The Future For Casual Game Revenue Growth? – that appeared on the GamaSutra news site tries to identify the different ways in which the developer of a casual game can make a living. Try to answer the following questions based on your reading of it:

The article identifies three main ways of raising revenue:

- In-game advertising, in which advertising space is sold within a game; the developer uses ad-revenue to provide them with an income;
- “the direct route”, whereby “a direct connection [is made] between independent developers and gamers”; here, the developer tries to sell direct to the end-user. This position is contrasted with ‘selling out’ to a publisher who is likely to market the game in a traditional way;
- “increase the perceived value of their games by upping the price”: that is, sell the game as a “superior product”, a counter-intuitive and potentially risky strategy in which differentiation of the game is achieved by pricing it above that of competitors, some of which are made to look cheap, and – one hopes – of lower perceived quality!

Several other approaches are mentioned in passing in the closing section: “promotional contests to award points to those who purchase new games, thereby increasing sales and loyalty. In-site ads, merchandising and game trailers, which are sold as advertising elsewhere”.

Casual games are seen to be similar to television sitcoms in that “…in exchange for the ability to play and be entertained for a short period of time, people are willing to watch ads” (these ads correspond to the interstitial or pre-roll ads that were described in Ad-Supported Gaming). However, it is also possible “to integrate dynamic in-game advertising platforms into the game. [That is, in-game advertising.] With the constant connection, the adverts can be altered based upon a player’s moves, or even their geographic location, providing targeted and more effective advertising. … It wouldn’t be surprising if in-game ads soon become integral to the content of a game, offering clues, extra levels or other hidden rewards for the player who clicks through.” In-game advertising, even in casual games, offers the potential for interaction. By engaging the player emotionally in the game, they may well be forced to pay more attention to the promotional message or advertised goods (for example, if you have to go in search of the missing Nuvo Cola can…!)

Can you think of any other “routes to free” for casual games? Post your thoughts back as comments… Here are some ideas to get you started: Lions, Tigers, Free Games… Oh My!.

How do you think advertising could be used to provide an income stream for the publisher of a computer game? Think about whether any games you have played brought you in contact with adverts from other companies, or browse through some of the posts on Business & Games: The Blog, to give you some more ideas.

Making Games Pay the Advertising Way

Looking across the ad-supported gaming market as a whole, there appear to be three dominant ways of using adverts to support computer games:

• “Ads around the edges”;
• Advergames;
• In-Game Advertising.

Let’s look at some of those models in a little more detail.

“Ads Around the Edges”

Many online casual games are hosted on websites such as Kongregate or games.co.uk that contain adverts. The games are the hooks that pull people into the websites where they are forced to view adverts. The ads may appear as banner ads along the top of the screen, or in a sidebar alongside the game. Alternatively, the advert may appear as a “pre-roll” advert that plays in the game window before you are allowed to play the game.

Not surprisingly, Google (which is an advertising sales company…) has got into the game advertising business with its Adsense for Games product that operates in both these ways, providing opportunities for publishers place “appropriate” adverts alongside Flash games on gaming websites, as well as ‘embedding’ pre-roll and interstitial (“ad-break”) adverts “within” the game.

Advergames

Advergames are games that are heavily branded and as such essentially “are” the advert. Advergames typically present a game world that reflects the advertiser’s branding, or at least the message the advertiser wants to communicate, and in so doing potentially engages the interest of the player for many valuable minutes in what advergame developer Skyworks calls “branded interactive entertainment”.

Advergames are typically casual games, although two extremes are possible: for example, a pre-existing game may be bought “off-the-shelf” and rebranded with a particular company logo (a digital equivalent of company branded giveaway pens!); or they may be custom designed for a particular campaign.

The custom design route is particularly evident in large corporate advertising campaigns, where the advergame is just part of a wider campaign, and is likely to have production values as high as the other parts of the campaign (photo ads, TV adverts, and so on). As you might expect, such advergames can be very expensive to develop.

A good example of a game developed as part of a wider campaign is the Honda Problem Playground website. The rationale behind the website – and its role in the campaign – is described here: Honda Joy of Problems and how it got there.

Visit the Problem Playground website and play some of the games there. How would you know that this game is an advergame if you came across it whilst looking for a new online game to play? What message is the Problem Playground trying to communicate? Post your thoughts as a comment back here.

Now read through the “How it got there” article – does the rationale for the game described there fit with your interpretation of the game?

Have a look round for some other high profile advergames and see if you can identify what sort of message they are trying to communicate. Here are a couple of examples to get you started: Stella Artois advergame and Guinnes “Legend of the Golden Domino” advergame.

In-Game Advertising/Product Placement

In-game advertising places adverts within the game itself, either as an advert inside the game, or via product placement (giving a particular make or model of car a prominent place in a racing game, for example).

Watch the following promotional video from IGA Worldwide, a video game advertising agency. As you are doing so, note down the different ways that adverts are placed into the games. Does the setting of particular genres of game make in-game advertising more or less appropriate? What would be a good example of “in-context” advertising within a game? And what might an inappropriate advert be?

For more examples of contemporary in-game advertising, see the Case Study showreels from the IGA Worldwide advertising network.

Revenue streams for in-game advertising are determined in different ways for the different modes of in-game placement. For example, adverts shown on in-game billboards might be paid for using a “traditional” internet advertising model – “CPM” (cost per thousand impressions). For every 1000 views of the advert, the advertiser will be charged a certain amount.

For each of the three modes of ad-support described above, write down the pros and cons of each approach, either in a blog post that links back here, or as a comment to this post. Some of the things you might consider are: time/cost to produce the ad; time spent by the viewer watching the ad; likely reach of the ad (how many people are likely to engage with it, is it amenable to a “viral” (word-of-mouth) distribution model); and so on.

Further Reading:: if you would like to learn more about ad-supported gaming, this History of In-Game Advertising is well worth a red (it includes video walkthroughs of several early advergames), as well as the more comprehensive Advertising in Computer Games MSc thesis (MIT), both of which are by Ilya Vedrashko.

Enter the Puma Racing advergame, a game designed to promote the Puma all-in-one racing suit, apparently…

The controls are “typical” racing game commands:

So get suited up, and let’s go :-)

If that’s not to your liking, how about this F1 racing game from Intel?

First you have to check your reaction times…

Then try a pit stop:

Then you can drive….

Err, only I couldn’t – because I couldn’t make the pit stop… and even after repeated tries, it didn’t seem to get any easier and I gave up… So does this mean the game failed insofar as I would have spent longer playing it if I’d actually made it as far as the game proper?! ;-)

For more advergames, check out the Vanksen CultureBuzz Advergame blog or this AdvergameBlog.

PS I’ll be writing a post or two about advergames – and ad-supported gaming over the next week or so – so I thought I should get a little ad in for those too… ;-)

What different roles were described? What role do you (think you would) fall into, and why?

Another way of categorising player types comes from Richard Bartle, who you might remember was responsible for maintaining MUD, the original online Multi-User Dungeon (Text Adventures – The Evolution of an Idea).

The “Bartle Types”, or roles that players of adventure games are claimed to fall into, are described in Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, by Richard Bartle. Read at least the first two sections of the paper (“A Simple taxonomy” and “Interest Graph”), note down the four different player types and the characteristics that define them. How do they compare (if at all!) to the different roles players might fall into in an Alternate Reality Game? Do the “ARG Roles” map onto the “Bartle Interest Graph” in an obvious way? To what extent do you think the Bartle Types might apply to participants in any multi-user virtual world, not just multi-user adventure games? Note down your thoughts in a comment to this post, or in a blog post of your own which you should link back here.

Based on your reading of “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades”, what “Bartle Type” do you think best describes the way you (might) interact in an online multi-user adventure game? Now try out this online Bartle Test – does it categorise you in the way you expected?

If you’ve ever read (or should that be: ‘played’?) a “Choose Your Own Adventure” or “Fighting Fantasy” gamebook, you’ll be familiar with the form, although in the case of these text adventure books, rather than a prompt you are offered a series of options about what to do next:

You are stood in a large cavern. There are exits to the north and west. In front of you is an old chest. Do you:
- go north (turn to page 23);
- go west (turn to page 17);
- open the chest (turn to page 41).

As you might suspect, this type of structure is easily replicated in a computer programme (and even more easily in a hypertext environment such as the world wide web!).

If you would like to try out an interactive fiction game along the lines of Adventure, there is a good selection of classic games that can be played, for free, online at: ifiction.org). An online version of Colossal Cave can be found at: The Annotated “Colossal Cave” Adventure.

To what extent would you say “interactive fiction” counts as a game? What sort of narrative structure might you expect to find in such a “game”, and what sort of structure would be inappropriate?

Towards Multiplayer online adventure games

With the rise of computer networks, the adventure game genre soon moved online, and 1979 saw the release of the first MUD – or multi-user dungeon – created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle of Essex University (you can read about the origins of the game in authentic form here: Early MUD History, with a timeline here: Incarnations of MUD).

In contrast to Colossal Cave, a game that was run on a “mainframe” computer and then played via a terminal by individuals with an account on that computer, MUD was an online game that could be accessed by many people at the same time via an early incarnation of the internet (this was a time years before the advent of the world wide web…).

What do you think are the major differences in terms of gameplay and technology requirements between a single person adventure game such as Colossal Cave, and a multi-player adventure game such as MUD?

The Interface Moves On

Although notable in that it did come with illustrations to support the text based descriptions, (and in doing so opened up the possibility of using visual puzzles to enrich the game), “The Hobbit”, a game based on JRR Tolkien’s book of the same name, and first released for some of the most popular home computers of the time in 1982 took the next step in text gaming with a parser that could cope with far more complicated grammatical expressions than most of the games of the time.

[A parser is a particular sort of computer programme that can "parse" - or understand - a sentence in terms of certain grammatical structures. That is, give a simple sentence, it might be able to identify the subject and object of that sentence, what the verb is, whether there is an adjective, and so on. Parsers lay at the heart of simple "chatbots" - for several examples, see Chatterbox Challenge, or have a go at scripting your own chatbot.]

From Text Games to 3D Worlds – Is There a Link?
Although many of today’s contemporary online role playing games such as World of Warcraft are based in fantasy worlds that may be reminiscent of the worlds conjured up in the earliest text adventure games, it is arguable that their gameplay owes little to those earlier games. However, as we shall see in a future post, many of the social roles that individual players can fall into when playing a multi-user adventure game from 20 years ago are the same roles that exist in today’s multimedia, immersive 3D fantasy worlds.

Although today’s fantasy role playing games are very different in style to the early text based adventure games, some commentators have tried to see them as a developing genre. The following video shows just how far massively multiplayer online roleplaying games have come in a visual sense, from the original MUD text adventure, to the 3D persistent virtual worlds of today.

To find out more about the latest massively mutliplayer online role-playing games, check out the MMORPG Center – Massively Multiplayer Online Games Portal or this MMORPG Online 100 Chart.

Further Reading
If you are interested in reading more about the evolution of computer based role playing games, you might find the following series of articles on Gamasutra interesting:
The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part 1: The Early Years (1980-1983)
The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part 2: The Golden Age (1985-1993)
The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part III: The Platinum and Modern Ages (1994-2004)

So I was quite intrigued to see a perceptual reasoning ‘game’ today (on a woodworking website of all places!) which presents you with “a series of geometries that need to be adjusted a little bit to make them right. A square highlights the point that needs to be moved or adjusted. Use the mouse to drag the blue square or arrowhead where you feel it is ‘right’. Once you let go of the mouse, the computer evaluates your move, so don’t let up on the mouse button until you are sure.”

The context of the game is described as follows: “If you are somebody who is into woodworking or construction, its good to be one of the people who notice when things are crooked. But I suspect the ability to notice that things might be just a little off square, off centre, or not quite straight, varies greatly. I thought it would be fun for people to try to test their abilities to see if things are straight or crooked in a little game.”

So for example, in the following example, you have to move the corner to create a parallelogram:

You can find the game here: The Eyeballing Game (instructions).

If you give it a go, post how well you did back here ;-)

If that’s too, err, quirky(?) for you, how about a round of golf – in a browser? World Golf Tour.

See you in the clubhouse… ;-)

The following presentation by games designer David Perry at the TED conference in February 2006 includes a video sequence put together by Michael Highland.

Watch the sequence through – it’s about ten minutes long and starts 9 minutes 49 seconds into the video and ends at 18 minutes 32 seconds (or watch this unofficial edit of the sequence directly).

So what do you think? Did you find the sequence thought provoking? And if so, what thoughts did it provoke?

Here are some of the things I took away from it: Michael Highland suggests that he can’t help but be seduced by the pull of media that is been finely crafted to produce an emotional response in him as a viewer or as a participant. He suggests that the increasing fidelity of game worlds will increasingly lead us to come to to believe that the skills and experiences we have in those worlds are transferable to the real world (which is surely a claim that the developers of serious games would also make?). But more than that, he also claims that by manipulating our emotions, game developers can help us reconnect with a world in which the news media continually fails to engage us in emotional terms.

Michael Highland also raises some concerns, such as that real life is coming to more closely resemble game life, as this Business Week article reporting from the Farnborough Air Show in July 2008 suggests (Raytheon Taps Video Games to Pilot Drones):

Based around a multiscreen console complete with on-screen health and weapons updates, Raytheon’s UCS [Universal Controller System] has cherry-picked elements from the gaming industry to give pilots more control over their unmanned aircraft. The UAV’s [unmanned aerial vehicle's] onboard camera, for example, has been augmented with digital images similar to Google Earth that give the operator an almost 180-degree view. That lets Raytheon overlay other data, such as where troops are located, on top of the enhanced view in the same way video games offer players extra on-screen information.

“Gaming companies have spent millions to develop user-friendly graphic interfaces, so why not put them to work on UAVs?” says Mark Bigham, business development director for Raytheon’s tactical intelligence systems. “The video-game industry always will outspend the military on improving human-computer interaction.”

The video clip also raises the point that the video game addict might well have spent more time driving in virtual worlds than driving in the real world – my immediate thought here was in the case of an accident, would muscle memory take over in controlling the driver’s actions? And muscle memory acquired where?

The video clip closes with a mention of the responsibilities of games developers as they become increasingly adept at manipulating our emotions. Where do you think those responsibilities begin, and end? Post your thoughts a comment to this post, or post them elsewhere and link back to this post.

PS the full TED video contains another video sequence that is well worth watching. If you didn’t watch the whole presentation through and only what Michael Highland’s sequence, the other clip (with a tint bit of qualifying commentary at the end) runs from 6m11s to 9m33s and shows in 3 minutes just how far video games have come in graphical terms over the last 20 years.

Technology moves on, of course, but sports TV in particular now makes use of similar technique to show how international athletes piece together their performances.

The above movie gives an example of the StroMotion^TM effect developed by video engineers Dartfish. The technique can also be used to create static, composite images, as this example demonstrates:

In addition to augmenting sports broadcasts, the technique can also be used to support the training of athletes, or as a more general educational aid.

The StroMotion^TM name presumably takes inspiration from the word stroboscope. Explain in what way(s) this is appropriate.

What video clips can you think of that might reveal some insight if they were processed using the StroMotion^TM approach?

Sports broadcasting also makes use of ‘augmented reality’ techniques, for example in the use of digital “overlays” on top of a video image where lane numbers may be overlaid on top of the pool lanes in a swimming competition (or indeed, as a moving ‘world record pace’ line showing how close the actual swimmers are to a world record pace), or distances may be plotted from the ball to the flag in a golf broadcast (see for example the Vizrt VizArena^TM system, which “enables broadcasters to superimpose static and animated 3D graphics over the live coverage of a sports event”).

As another example, the BBC “Piero” system can be used to add ‘tied-to-pitch’ graphical overlays and 3D views of recorded sports action by placing players in a virtual stadium within which they can be viewed from different angles (Piero, also described here: Piero sports graphics system wins two awards).

What other examples of ‘digital overlays’ can you think of in the realm of sports broadcasting? Add any links you find – particularly links to video examples – as a comment below.

(If you’re creatively minded, there’s also a “create” editor in Boom Blox that allows you create your own levels.)

So why does everything fall the way it does in Boom Blox? Physics…

In the post Gravity Waves, I mention three games based around simulated physics – Newtoon, Launchball (a browser based physics puzzle game, also with its own level creation tool) and Phun. In each case, the idea is to manipulate or create objects in the game world and then let physics – gravity, elasticity, and so on – have its way…

Crayon Physics is another construction-led physics game (in many respects reminiscent of Phun) in that the idea is to… well, watch the following video clip, and you decide…

How would you describe Crayon Physics?

Physics games are games that involve the player directly and purposefully engaging with the physics of the game world. But for many games, whether they are 2D Pacman like arcade games, or 3D games set in realistic simulated real world settings, physics still plays a part. Why can’t Pacman walk through a wall, for example? And why do cars crash just the way they do in many a 3D racing game? Physics, that’s why…

According to the presentation shown above (or otherwise), what, in the context of game physics, are:

• “rigid bodies”;
• “soft bodies”;
• “ragdolls”.

In many games, a physics engine is used to manage the behaviour of both small and large objects alike according to set of mathematical equations that model the physics – that is, the physical behaviour – of the the objects. This behaviour extends from describing how objects move, or fall, to how they swerve round each other, and what happens when collide: people generally can’t walk through walls, for example, but neither do they tend to break, or shatter, or crumple…

The mathematics involved in calculating game physics can be very computationally expensive and difficult to programme, particularly as simulations get more realistic and require the behaviour of ever increasing numbers of particles to be modeled. Many games make use of licensed physics engines that have been developed by specialist companies or the larger game developers, which means that they can benefit from complex simulations without the need to programme that behaviour in from scratch.

Read the Gamasutra article Outsourcing Reality: Integrating a Commercial Physics Engine. If physics is (not yet) your thing, the following may help you in your reading:

• Integration Basics: Geometry Export: what basic shapes is the physics engine likely to undertsand?
• Time Management: what are ‘game time’, ‘frame time’ and ‘simulation time’ and how do they relate to each other?
• Applying Forces: in what three ways can an object be compelled to move in a physical model?
• Spatial Queries: in what ways might the physics engine allow ‘logical statements’ to be made about the interaction of different characters in the game world?
• Integrating Keyframed Motion: although many game objects move in the way they do because of physics, and the forces applied to them, some objects may have been animated as keyframes – that is, they have been drawn to move in a single particular way and as such will not respond to any forces applied to them, although they may exert forces on objects they are in contact with…
• Player Control Strategies: to simplify collision detection, a simple, regularly shaped ‘bounding box’ or ‘capsule’ is often drawn around game and player characters. This box is then used as the basis for collision detection.

  What are the ‘three fundamental approaches’ to controlling how the player character actually moves? How does the choice of approach affect the ‘usability’ of the game in terms of how easy the character is to control?

Plausible – and well modeled – game physics can make a significant difference to the feel of game, both from a usability (ease of control) point of view, as well as a degree of faithfulness point of view (for example, some racing games pride themselves on how realistic the physical behaviour of the cars is).

Getting to grips with game physics can also be a great way of learning about real physics – and the maths used to describe it – because it provides a real context for using the equations. If you would like to learn more about game physics, a good place to start is with these OpenLearn videos on differential equations…

To learn more about physics games, visit the Fun-Motion physics games blog. As well as a comprehensive listing of physics related ‘games’, it also includes a wide range of posts and video clips relating to many issues of game physics.

But live data games have actually been around for some time…

One such example is Sharkrunners, from the Discovery Channel.

Sharkrunners first appeared at the start of last summer (Live Data Gaming – Sharkrunners), as a television series tie-in, and then returned for a second season based around the Great Barrier Reef.

The aim of the game is to equip a research boat and go in search of real sharks, either as a research scientist, as a documentary maker, or with an ecological mission in mind. Finding a shark brings rewards for the captain of the boat in terms of finance which can be used to hire extra crew, purchase additional scientific instruments, and improve the boat. The shark location data is based on telemetry from real sharks, although ‘live’ weather conditions don’t feature as part of the game (yet?!).

The game is played in real time, so the player must set waypoints for the ship to travel between that will hopefully lead to a shark encounter. When a shark is detected within range of the boat, an email or SMS message is sent to the player so they can log in to the game and take an appropriate action.

I played Sharkrunners over a two week period last summer, and have just signed up for another tour of duty now ;-)

If you watch television sport at all, in particular golf, cricket, or tennis, you are likely to have seen computer graphics that ‘replay’ particular shots (tennis, cricket), or offer player’s eye view perspectives of the game setting (snooker).

The Hawkeye and PointTracker systems are capable of tracking a ball’s trajectory and then replaying it, as this video clip describes:

(To see an example of PointTracker in action, visit the 2006 US Open PointTracker website.)

A rather less exact approach appears to be used as part of the Cricinfo 3d visualisation, as described in this post by Martin Belam: Will virtual representations of sporting events become part of the online rights economy?: “Rather than just describing the action in near real-time, they show you, using a game engine to simulate the match being played in their Cricinfo 3D feature. As each ball in the over is bowled, a Shockwave plug-in on the web-page illustrates the action.”

In this case, it seems that a canned repertoire of bowls and shots is used as a palette from which a shot “replay” can be illustrated (rather than a faithful visualisation of an actual ball trajectory, and stroke played?)

Some time ago, I wondered aloud in a blog post about whether or not the time was approaching when the TV sports viewer might be able to ‘play along’ with TV sports action (Re:Play – The Future of Sports Gaming? “I’ll Take it From Here…”):

For example:

- in a cricket sim, rather than watch a replay of a particular delivery, you could take the bat and see if you could do better. The fielding positions and the actual flight of the ball (captured using something like HawkEye) would be faithful – at least at the start of the shot!

- in a snooker sim, you could pick up a (real) 147 break making frame after the reds have been cleared.

- in an F1 race, you could take over the drive from a real driver. The AI controlling the other drivers could directly simulate an actual race for at least as long as the time as your actions have no influence on any other particular car.

- in a round of golf, you could matchplay an actual game against someone else – or pick up the hole at any point in a championship winning round.

So what? you may say… Sounds a bit dull… just replaying some old game…

Ah yes – but what about if you ‘take it from here’ during the actual event and play along, maybe split screen style?

Or maybe during the TV replay, your digital ents box offers you a re:play? That is, you get to try the shot, etc. (maybe even ‘for real’, Wii style ;-)

It’d be one way of filling time while the adverts are on!

What this boils down to is interactive sports viewing; or in other words: “I could have made that one – here, I’ll show you…”.

So is the era of “interactive television sports” a real possibility? It would seem so…

Read this BBC Technology news post on Real racing in the virtual world. What information needs to be collected to create a “play along with the race” Formula One motor racing game? What problems can you foresee in this sort of playalong game, where several you are competing against real cars and drivers in real time, compared to what is essentially a turn based, single player game such as golf?

You can read more about iOpener’s approach to “real time racing” here: Real Time Racing.

The premise behind many of these games was that if a moving object (as captured by the webcam) moved to an area of the screen where a digital object was (such as a ‘balloon’) then the moving real world player would have been deemed to have hit the digital object. That is, if the moving player image is at the same part of the screen as a digital object, a ‘collision event’ is raised, just as if a player controlled game character collided with the object in ‘normal’ game, and some action is taken as a result (such as the balloon being ‘popped’).

As many of the algorithms used to perform motion detection are computationally expensive, it was no surprise that one of the early webcam games was promoted by chipmaker Intel, who were keen to demonstrate how powerful their processors were at the time. As this quote from Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, in a Business Week article from December 2007 suggests, the trend toward using increasing computer processing power to implement ever more powerful video based control systems may still hold true: “We imagine some future generation of [Nintendo's] Wii won’t have hand controllers,” says . “You just set up the cameras around the room and wave your hand like you’re playing tennis” (Supercomputing for the Masses).

Like this, maybe? Camspace:

As far as the ‘user’ is concerned, what are the main similarities and differences between the simple motion detection used in basic webcam games, and the techniques used in the more elaborate motion tracking techniques required for augmented reality and motion capture?

As with many other technologies that have left the controlled environment of the lab and made it into everyday use, it is worth watching how artists are making use of these technologies in their own artworks – and the halfway house between the lab and the everyday world that is the public art gallery – to get an idea for how we might interact with these systems in the (near) future.

For example, the following video shows how Animata, a “real-time animation software” toolkit, that has been “designed to create interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances”

Keep an eye out for installations in your local gallery, arts center or media center that make use of video based controllers – they are excellent way of exploring some of the issues and ideas around how we might interact in the future…

If you even been to a science discovery center, it’s quite likely that you’ll have seen an exhibit based around a piece of theatrical trickery known as Pepper’s Ghost.

The effect is used to make a ghostly apparition appear and disappear from a scene – see if you can find out how the effect works…

A recent twist to the illusion allows digitally projected 3D animations to come to life on stage:

The same trick can be used to create a feeling of telepresence, for example in the case of large business presentations:

Recalling the theatrical origins of the technique, this New York Times “presentation’ describes a recent theatrical performance that uses the same effect: First Person Ghost Lighting

One company that is championing the ‘digital Pepper’s ghost” approach is the UK based Musion Systems Ltd (Musion Systems blog). The following video sequence shows how they create the illusion with their Musion Eyeliner system.

To what extent does this system represent something ‘new’ and to what extent is it just an extension of Victorian theatrical stagecraft?

For what sorts of game might this technique provide a compelling user interface? Are there any game genres where it is unlikely to be effective? Why?

The animations were painted on to the original “human action” film during a period of post production, but nevertheless, the result is still quite compelling.

Many film productions today also use post production techniques to add photo-realistic computer generated imagery (CGI) to a film, particularly in the area of special effects and ‘digital virtual set design’, but what if it were possible to actually interact with digital creations in real time?

Step-in, augmented reality…

There are several augmented toolkits available on the web, many of which use the approach demonstrated in this BBC Radio 1 promotion:

A series of easily identified, high-contrast images are registered with the AR system (that is, the system is trained to recognise them) and then different movie clips are associated with those images. When the image is recognised, the video clip is overlaid on the image and starts to play. As well as videos, 3D computer graphics may also be superimposed on the detected image.

You can see more clearly how different patterns might be registered and associated with different 3D models in this page about the ARTag, augmented reality system: ARTag. (See also the ARToolkit – warning: if you don’t know what a compiler is, this isn’t for you…)

One of the easiest ways of experiencing augmented reality is to try out the Fix8 animation tool that lets you animate your own appearance by registering key facial features and then animating on top of those: Fix8

(If you do have a go at creating a Fix8 movie, why post a link back to it here as a comment to this post?!:-)

How many ways can you think of using augmented reality? Write down two or three ideas as a comment to this post.

To get you started, here’s how you might use augmented reality to support car maintenance:

…or maybe Lego car maintenance!

(Lego have also started experimenting with augmented reality kiosks that register a tag on a Lego box and then display a 3D animation of the model that can be constructed from that Lego set sitting on top of the box.)

Finally, here are a few ideas for augmented reality games: Top 10 augmented reality demos that will revolutionize video games. (Note that this list may be a little dated by now – if you manage to find any more recent examples, please post a link back to them in a comment to this post.)

So how does AR actually work? To explain that, I’ll need another post…