woensdag 27 februari 2008

My field study

Philips Entertaible


The entertaible is a multi-user, multi-touch table invented by the research team of Philips that can detect touch as well as objects. The concept is a tabletop gaming platform that combines electronic gaming and traditional board games.

“Entertaible offers the means to reinvigorate established board game classics,” comments Gerard Hollemans of Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who leads the research team that developed Entertaible. “However, in the longer term, Entertaible could be used to invent brand new games offering unprecedented levels of user interaction – games that would never become predictable or ever quite ‘feel’ the same twice, however often you played them.”

Source: Philips.com

With this Philips really set a trend and a lot of people are already thinking about the possibilities.
Below you can find some intertesting ideas from the staff of critical gamers and from Tom Bramwell:

* The ability to save your game at any time and finish it later.
* Background animations. Unit animations. The board will become alive!
* No stacked counters to accidentally push over, or for the cat to jump on, or for the dog to eat, or for earthquakes to shake, or for scarfs to come unhitched and wipe off the board.
* Have all your boardgames with you, all the time, and in one box.
* Networking over the Internet! This alone creates amazing potential. Play against friends who've moved across the country. Play in tournaments online. Massively Online Board Games! Oh my.
* Download user generated content from strangers and from friends: New games, new variants, new art.


"Other advantages could involve on-screen explanations of the rules as you play through a game, the ability to save your progress mid-play and the option to store loads of board games without needing loads of space for all the pesky boxes. Plus you might be able to hook the thing up to the Internet and download trials of new games some day."


Conclusion:
It seems like people are already busy with the idea of combining traditional board games with video games. Philips is already scouting game designers for their entertaible which shows there is a demand for exciting games that use the full potential of such a device. That got me wondering, how can you translate traditional board games to a multi-user, multi-touch table without the use of objects (eg. dice, cards, etc.)?

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Settlers of Catan



If you are not familiar with this board game and you are interested in how to play it I suggest you take a look here. The Settlers of Catan is just one of the many examples of a board game that has been ported to a video game. The board game was first published in 1995 by Kosmos, the game soon became very popular and ten years later in 2005 the first official spin-off has been published by Oberan Media and was called Catan: The Computer Game and looked like this:



As you can see it has been directly ported to the computer, with that I mean every gameplay element like the dice (top left of the screen), the cards (bottom right), the pawns and everything is right there and you control it by clicking with the mouse on the desired options and in case of placing your buildings you drag a building on the desired place. Interesting enough it does include some new features that come with the benefits of a computer, you have the statistics and your resources will automaticly be placed in your hand. Also now you don't need your friends in order to play the game, because you can play against the computer who is always available. Microsoft acquired the game for MSN Games later on in 2005 and renamed it to Catan Online.

Two years later, in 2007, a spin-off caled Catan was released by Big Huge Games and became a big hit on the xbox arcade for the xbox 360. In the titlescreen they kindly write that this is a "electronic version of The Settlers of Catan board game". Which is fair, because that's exactly what it is. Besides the improved interface and design not much has been changed. It's again a direct port from board to video game with the presents of the board, cards, dice, etc.



Conclusion:
Board games are very easily directly ported to another medium. This doesn't necessarily has to mean that, that's a bad thing, it just feels that a lot of potential is lost in the process. The die for example were a solution from the designers of the board game to calculate a chance, to get a number between one and six, in this case with two dice, between two and twelve. A computer, although logic, has become very good in giving random numbers and so I think a game designer, when porting a board game to a video game, should think of those base solutions and design something that does the same on a computer without effecting the essence of the game.

For example instead of using dice click on the board to begin charging an electric meter and once at the prefered height of the player, release the mouse and see how that electric volt goes through the ground and walks through the board litting up every piece of ground it passes. In beginning, like a wheel, it will go very fast and in the end it will go slower and slower till it finaly stops and lit up the piece of ground that normaly corresponds to a number you threw with the die.

So my questions are the following. Can companies get away with porting board games one on one? Does it give the same amount of satisfaction and fun for the player as with the board game? Is it a different kind of fun? What would happend if you took the essence of the board game and translated that to the full potential of the computer or in my case a multi-user, multi-touch screen? What effect will that have on people? Will they see it as a brand new game? What does it contribute to the experience? And most important is this the end of the traditional board games? Can a virtual version replace it?

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Board Games in Combination with other Media



If you look at some of the board games that are created today you can see that they are getting more and more depended on technology. This also shows that there is a certain need which couldn't be for filled by traditional methods. I am interested in what media these board games used and why, because with the use of a multi-user, multi-touch screen a lot of media can be combined and you do not need to have other media present.

In the above picture you can see the board game LiveQuiz. Like the name already reveales it's your every day quiz game but it's using one unique factor, the questions never get out of date. In other quiz games like the very popular Trivia the questions that are being asked are always about the past, so how can you create a board game that asks questions with today's answers? That's a question that Identity Games must have thought of when designing the game.

They decided to combine the board game with the internet to receive the up to date answers. Therefor besides the board game you need a working internet connection and a device that can go to their website to play the game. The game itself has cards with questions like 'Who is the current James Bond?' and 'Was it colder today then yesterday?' which the answer can then be found on their website. When you get to the center of the game board you need to answer the daily question, this question can only be found and answered on the website. The game has won the award Game of the Year 2007 and it got me thinking in this case, do people actual need the board game? Cause now the way I see it, it only shows the position of the player on the board which can easily also be showed on the computer screen.



In Scene It, another quiz game, you answer questions depending on the video material on the screen with the use of a DVD. This means besides the board game you need a tv and a DVD player to play the game.

Conclusion:
To make a long story short, it seems like we are already trying to modernize the traditional board games by combining it with other media like DVD and the internet.

The internet is being used for a lot of reasons but concerning to games mostly for actual information, downloadable content, updates (to fix any unbalanced gameplay issues) and to play against other players over the world. The DVD is being used to show video material, like films and animations. All which can not be done without the help of none-electronic methods.

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Human vs Computer



I came across this photo on the internet it shows Vladimir Kramnik, a russian chess grandmaster, playing against the computer with the help of a software program called Deep Fritz. It's yet another example of a combination between board games and the computer.

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The Casino



Many elements of a board game can be automated with the use of a computer. A perfect example is that of the dice. A human has to throw the dice to get a random number, a computer can generate this random number for you in a fraction of a second and even automaticly move the pawn to it's new position. The question is, can you get away by removing those elements? A turn can completely go automatic with the user only giving input on certain decisions. So does for example throwing the dice contribute to the fun factor of a game or would we rather want the computer to do this for us?

If you ask me the die makes us feel like we can influence the outcome on the way we throw and how hard we throw it and therefor influence the outcome of the game, hence give us the feel of control which increases the fun factor. It's a psychological thing that casino's know all to well. They use (flashing) light, sound, animations, buttons and other things to trick you, for example imagine that you just won 200 points, instead of immediatly adding 200 points to your score it will quickly at the points one by one to your score with a sound on the background that get's louder and louder as it gets closer and closer to have added all the 200 points. The positive feeling of winning is getting stronger this way. Same goes for the button like 'Hold', we know that it really doesn't influence the outcome of this chance machine, but it feels like we can control it. It seems like we want to be fooled for fun.

Conclusion:
Throwing a die in a board game gives us the feeling that we influence the game. I have seen people holding the die, blowing against it, rubbing it then throwing it and anxiently waiting for the die to stop rolling. My guesses are that these elements really do matter to the fun factor of a board game, but the question that then comes to mind is. Can this experience be translated to a virtual board game?

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Photoplay



Photoplay is a machine that has a lot of games on it and uses a touch screen for people to interact with it. Here you can already actualy see how this touch screen brings people together, if you go to an arcade, bar or any other place where they might have this standing there you might see that in most cases there is more then one people sitting behind it, making it a very social happening. I browsed the internet and found this dutch forum where people were interested in finding those games for the PC and the reply interested me.

"Is there an option that you can buy the game photoplay for the pc?"
Dje

"something like that does exist on the internet, yes, but it's not as fun as the real thing"
Joachim
Source: Fok! Forum

I also remember a certain holiday in france, we stayed at a camping place and in the bar they had this old photoplay machine in the corner and at night it really became the meeting point of many people. It started with two people and by the end of the night a whole crowd was gathering behind the machine.

This machine interests me because it combines touch screen games with people socially interacting with each other around one screen.

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FireFly for Microsoft's Surface



I just got news about the very first game application for Surface, a multi-touch table designed by Microsoft, it's called FireFly designed by Carbonated Games. The video shows that also Microsoft is thinking very hard about the possibilities of gaming on a multi-user, multi-touch table.