I’ve been thinking about board games and card games recently (ok, I’ve been thinking about them for years, but over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about them more than I have all semester). Part of the motivation I have for creating “AR board games” (AR games that combine computer games and board/card games) is to recreate the social play experience of these games. The experience I imagine is that of sitting around a table, playing a game with friends, where you are looking at each other and playing in the same physical space. These experiences seem qualitatively different than the experience of multiplayer computer/console games, even games on the Wii.
But, I wonder about some of the non-obvious ways ways these games are different. Today, as I was walking to the coffee shop to get beans for our espresso machine, I was thinking about the ways games enforce rules, and how board games and card games are fundamentally different than computer games. With board and card games, rule enforcement is left up to the players; they know the rules, and they abide by them. Even when there is nobody around to “catch” them people naturally follow the rules; to cheat removes the fun. My dad played solitaire for hours to unwind after working shifts in an auto plant, and as far as I know, he never cheated. What would be the point?
Computer games, on the other hand, encourage players to do anything the game allows to win. Because the system is closed and the rules are enforced by the computer, finding ways to get around the system is part of the fun for many players. If the game let’s you do it, it must be ok!
But, this presents a problem, which I’ll put this way: will players treat hybrid computer/board games (or computer/card games) as board/card games or as computer games? Will they play along and follow the rules, even if nobody is there to “call them on it”, or will they do what they can to win? When there is a high score board, and achievements to unlock, will players be content to take what the deck gives, or will they stack the cards?
This question is more than academic, because it impacts the kinds of games we can create. Consider Sony’s Eye of Judgement, which is designed assuming players will treat the game as a computer game, and thus is structured to allow the computer to enforce the rules.
Click here to view the embedded video.
For those of you who have played the game, you know how awkward it is. After playing for a while, you realize that you are playing a relatively complex card game (ala Magic), but one where the computer’s main job is to enforce the rules. The computer is used for little else, beyond adding eye-candy to justify playing the game in awkward space of the PS Eye camera.
But beyond the awkwardness, one can’t help but wonder what the game might have been like if the players were trusted to follow the rules and enlisted in the gameplay. What kind of games could we create if the player was allowed to move cards fluidly, was allowed to manipulate their environment naturally, and not treated as a hostile, untrustworthy interloper? What if the rules were presented and it was assumed people would follow them?
Imagine a single player augmented card game that starts with the player shuffling a deck and laying out 9 cards in a grid. No checking by the computer, no proactive rule enforcement. BUT, like traditional solitaire, the placement of the cards determines much about how the game unfolds. Would such a game work? It’s hard to say. If a player approaches it like a card game, where the goal is to enjoy a pleasant diversion for a few minutes, and challenge yourself to solve a puzzle, perhaps such a game would work.
But, will players even consider that approach? After years of being trained by computer games to take any advantage offered by the computer, will they “cheat” and chose a card layout designed to give them the best start to the game? Will they even consider this “cheating”?
I’m not sure, but it certainly impacts the kinds of games we can create.
I was looking at the video of this app, “Jigsaw Live,” as I look at most potentially interesting AR apps. On the surface, it sounds interesting: ” an AR jigsaw puzzle.” I’ve been interested in making AR jigsaw puzzles for a while (heck, I even went to the extreme of sending mail to my favorite puzzle company, Stave, to see if I could interest them, to no avail). But, to me, the concept is about augmenting a puzzle.
After all, AR apps really need to have two components: reality + augmenting. If reality doesn’t really matter, than why bother with making it an AR app (for example, holding up the phone in this app to solve the “puzzle” is tiring, as it is with any app that requires you to hold the phone up for a period of time). And, you need to augment the reality in some way … right? Bring these two things together, and then add something fun, exciting, engaging or useful.
So, let’s consider this app, then.
They have reality, you might say. It’s live video on the puzzle pieces, so that’s reality, right … or, is it? Does reality matter? Not really, actually. It’s just video. Looking at something different doesn’t change the puzzle, nor affect the program. Reality is “just a texture” … it could be a video or image from you camera roll, and it wouldn’t really change things. The live video is cool at first; but, in the end, it’s just a gimmick.
Going further, do they “augment” it? No. Their “reality” (the video texture) augments their puzzle, but reality isn’t augmented, nothing is moved out into the world, nothing about the world around you is enhanced.
Perhaps the title “Jigsaw Live: Augmented Puzzle” would be a more accurate title? I think so. Unfortunately, even the puzzle doesn’t look that interesting. Square pieces? Up to 100? For $2.99? Yikes! I would have bought this and played with it if it was $0.99, since I’ll pretty much buy any potentially interesting app for that. But, for $3, you have to do better! The “ultimate in puzzle fun” (to quote their page)? Really? One wonders if the authors even played a puzzle (a real one, not one of those 4
This link wandered into my inbox this morning, and I must say, I’m impressed. It’s the first use of AR I’ve seen in a long time that seems genuinely novel and interesting; not just a gimmick or a trite repacking of an old idea. On the video, it seems like it would be upsetting and jarring (in sharp contrast with the novelty and “awe” of seeing this hybrid scene).
Click here to view the embedded video.
When I think about the discussions we have in our experience design class about how we need to design media experiences that take into account the media culture of the time, I can’t help but think that this is a great example of that. I wonder how many people are fascinated by the technology, and watch because it’s novel and exciting (judging by the faces of the folks in the video, many do), but then find themselves slightly uneasy about being captivated and entertained by what is otherwise an upsetting thing to watch. The conflict (however minor) this sets up in someone would be the ideal vehicle for having them reflect on the message and remember it. Not as in-your-face upsetting as some of the bloody public-service announcements we’ve seen recently (such as the gory anti-texting-while-driving ad that was put out in England this year), but something that causes people to be reflective without needing the shock value.
I wonder what it would be like to experience it; if anyone reading this has seen it, please add a comment and tell us what it’s like.
I was just reading Mike Zyda’s article in the December CACM on games and computer science education. It discusses the technical game education program they’ve created at USC in the CS department, and gives a nice overview of why they are doing things the way they are. Seems like a reasonable degree.
Yet, whenever I read about someone’s technical game degree program, I’m always left wondering about the jobs we’re pointing these students at, and the “unwritten pack” we make with students we accept into our programs. I’ve thought a lot about this, because the topic of a “game degree” comes up occasionally. I’m also teaching 3 game classes this semester (a game-oriented capstone, a game prototyping lab, and an augmented reality game design class), so I’m very focused on the issue of game education. Yet, with plenty of course and interest in games here at Georgia Tech, we haven’t created a full-blown game degree; our game education activities are folded into a number of other degrees that offer a broader education beyond games.
This article isn’t about our choices at GT, though. Rather, I interested in the opinions of others who might read this. I believe there is an implicit suggestion that, if we have a focused degree program in a technical area, it’s educating the students in preparation for actually doing something. With a liberal arts education, the goal is to give a broad education, and the students understand that there aren’t “liberal arts jobs” per se. But, I suspect that students don’t generally get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Information Security, or Pre-Med just because they want to broaden their horizons and open their minds; they get these sorts of degrees (presumably) because they want to work in these areas after they graduate (or move on to other degrees, in the case of pre-Med or pre-Law).
So it is, I think, with a computer science or technical game-oriented degree. Which brings me back to the topic of the post. I wonder how many “game degrees” are being created because the school honestly believes that there is an industry need they are fulfilling (industry has unfilled job positions and needs to have more folks educated to fill them) or because the university has a need they are fulfilling (the student enrollments are dropping and they need students to fill up the classes). For a number of years, CS enrollments have been down at many schools (we’ve been doing OK at Georgia Tech, and if you include our cross-over degrees like Computational Media, we’re actually doing better than OK, both at attracting students, but also at attracting students who aren’t young, white boys). Over the past few years, a number of schools have created game degrees that have attracted a lot of attention, not least because it appears that they attract a lot of students and because their graduates get to go and work in the game industry. That’s all well and good; a few schools (USC’s MS program in the School of Cinema TV, CMU’s MS in Educational Technology, our combined undergrad and grad degrees across CS, CM and Digital Media, for example) have a great reputation with the game industry, and the students coming out of the program have generally had good success in getting the jobs they want.
But, how many schools are just putting lipstick (and new name) on a pig (their dying CS degree programs) to attract new students?
Overall, my sense is that there aren’t that many great jobs in the game industry, at least not in the numbers that are needed to employ an increasing number of game program graduates. Especially the jobs many students seem to dream about (game design, game engine programming, etc.); here, I’m talking about technical and design jobs, I’m not talking about testing and QA, or level design, or content-oriented jobs (a few schools, like SCAD and RISD and so on, are doing a great job educating those students).
Unfortunately, when I read articles like Mike’s, I’m reminded of the increasing trend of CS departments to offer Game Degrees (note: I’m not saying this is what USC is doing; Mike has a long history of game education, going back to the Naval PostGraduate School, and actually came to USC to create a game program in the CS department). A game degree is a great fit … for the school. There is virtually no area of CS that isn’t applicable to the technical side of a modern game, especially the blockbuster console games; these games require everything a major CS degree offers, and then some. Taking your existing CS courses, faculty, labs and infrastructure, putting some new makeup on it, and calling it a game degree can be a great way to attract students. And (based on anecdotal evidence) for many schools, it seems to be helping. Helping them, that is, attract students.
My worry, though, is that as more and more schools offer game degrees, we’re going to turn out a generation of pseudo computer science students who can’t get the jobs they want. After all, how many jobs are there? I was chatting with a game industry exec at a recent conference, and he joked that, given the low turn-over in the good jobs, the good opportunities number in the hundreds … not in the thousands or more that will be needed to place these students.
So, I’d love to hear other folks thoughts on this, or get pointers to hard data about jobs and graduates.
For those of you interested in AR, Jarrell Pair’s recent post on the state of AR is a pretty good summary.
In general, I agree with Jarrell, although I am probably a bit more optimistic that he appears to be; for those who’ve read my previous posts, that may seem surprising. I think his comments in the first few sections (“Augmented Reality Glasses are not Viable in the Near Term”, “GPS and Compass is not Enough”, “Sensor Fusion is the Answer”) are pretty much dead on; if anything, I’d say he doesn’t emphasize enough just how impoverished an experience “GPS + Compass” limits designers to! In both our work at Georgia Tech, and in my company, we’ve experimented with what you can do with the GPS+Compass combo, and it’s hard to come up with non-trivial, compelling experiences.
The problem with the GPS+Compass is that, on any affordable device, these sensors are of such poor quality that they are almost useless for AR. Because the position accuracy, in particular, is so poor, you really can’t “put stuff in 3D” … you end up treating the world as a sphere around you on which you paint content that lies in a certain direction (which is what all the so-called “AR browsers” are doing; putting icons up for content that lies in roughly a certain direction). By explicitly acknowledging this limitation, that the AR world is really just a sphere around you, we designed and released a small application, SantaVision, on the iPhone just before Christmas; in this application, you put 2D stickers on a virtual sphere around you, ignoring the full 3D nature of the world and letting you decorate it from one location in space. The application is fun, but the limitations of the compass are fairly obvious.
As Jarrell points out, sensor fusion (combining these sensors with computer vision), is clearly the answer: this has been known for a while, highlighted by his reference to Ron Azuma’s PhD work in the late 90′s! (Ron is now doing AR work at Nokia’s Hollywood Lab, btw).
Of the 5 platforms he points out, I’d say the only two important ones are smartphones and tablets; the others are more practical now, because of the greater computing power they bring and because the constraints of their deployment make them easier to target. However, handheld devices offer a unique first-person perspective that I believe is essential to leveraging the full power of AR (this perspective is also offered by HMDs): by coupling the display with the camera (in video-see-through applications such as these) the technology creates the illusion that the display is being looked through at the world. This coupling facilitates a direct, natural interaction metaphor, that cannot be achieved with the other technologies mentioned.
Overall, I think his final point is key, which I would paraphrase as follows: the success of AR is tied to creating usable, useful, fun or entertaining applications and experiences. Novelty and gimmick’s will wear off soon, but fun experiences that take advantage of the unique nature of the technology (and thus can’t be achieved without it) will earn AR a place as a viable and lasting approach to as a human-computer interface.
While I usually reserve this spot to comment on the AR stuff other folks are working on, I thought I’d take this opportunity to comment on something we just released.
My colleague Maribeth Gandy and I create a small startup this year called Aura Interactive; while we are doing a variety of things with the company, ranging from consulting to product development, our main goal is to create some fun AR games and toys.
And so I’m happy to share that we’ve just had our first iPhone application (done in collaboration with our colleague Kim Spreen) go live in the iTunes App Store, a little toy we call SantaVision (click here to go directly to the app in the iTunes Store).
Like many people, we’ve struggled with the inability to “touch” the live video on the iPhone, and the corresponding inability to do accurate, fast 3D tracking, of the sort we leverage in our research prototypes (e.g., the Zombie shooter ARhrrrr!). At the same time, we’ve want to avoid creating yet-another shoot-the-
If you try it, let me know what you think. It’s not perfect, but we’re having fun with it!
I’m not quite sure what this means, but it is probably a good thing:
Zemoga, a pioneering digital marketing and innovation firm, today announced the launch of its augmented reality (AR) practice, designed to further the company’s work in this groundbreaking technology that has taken the marketing world by storm.
[...]
“We built the prototype of the human heart and could visually demonstrate in a dynamic 3D environment the effect a new drug would have on the heart,” explained Zemoga CEO and co-founder, DJ Edgerton.
I wonder if they are teaming up with an more experienced AR folks (if they are in New York, Steve Feiner’s group at Columbia seems like a good choice), to more rapidly leverage the research that’s been done over the years? Regardless, though, it’s interesting.
Most people who know me know that I remain unconvinced of the usefulness of wearing projectors around your neck, despite all the cute fake mocked-up demos that people do. But, if you are going to do something with projectors, that isn’t going to work “in the real world” anyway, why not something cool like this? (As an added bonus, this is done with a pile of those new Nikon cameras with the projectors built in.)
Click here to view the embedded video.