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Introducing Augmented Reality – Blending Real and Digital Worlds
The 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” merged the worlds of human live action and classic Disney animation to present a world in which human actors and cartoon characters acted alongside each other...
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Digital Worlds in the Real World: Augmenting Reality with a 21st Century Take...
In Introducing Augmented Reality – Blending Real and Digital Worlds, I introduced the idea of augmented reality in which digital graphical objects are overlaid on video images of real world scenes, to...
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Ad hoc Game Controllers – Use Whatever Comes to Hand
When webcams first started to appear, many of them shipped with simple games that incorporated basic image processing tools – such as motion detection – that let players engage in augmented reality...
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Play Along With the Real World…
In Ad hoc Game Controllers – Use Whatever Comes to Hand, I described how simple webcam/video controlled games used simple motion detection to generate on-screen collision events when player movements...
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Friday Fun #16 Sharkrunners
In Play Along With the Real World…, I describe the hypothetical notion of playing games in the context of real world data being fed from live sporting events. But live data games have actually been...
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Why Don’t Things Fall Up? Making Use of Physics Engines
When film director Stephen Spielberg first announced he would be collaborating on the development of a game for the Wii console, many people were intrigued as to what sort of storytelling extravaganza...
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Making Moving Pictures Stop
In Making Pictures Move, I briefly referred to the “time lapse” photography technique made famous by Edward Muybridge, in which a series of rapidly taken still photographs could be used to freeze the...
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The Future of Gaming: A Video Game Addict Speaks
With every year that goes by, more and more children are born into a life where they will always have known about interactive video games and social, online gaming. Educationalists are still trying to...
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Friday Fun #17 – Getting Your Eye In
One of the more popular gaming fads over the last couple of years have been the various “brain training” games, that provide a handheld game console vehicle for a variety of mental arithmetic, logical...
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Text Adventures – The Evolution of an Idea
For many years, one of the most popular game genres has been that of fantasy adventure games. One of the first computer adventure games – Will Crowther and Don Woods’ “Colossal Cave Adventure”, first...
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The Language of Games – Player Types
In the post ARGs Uncovered I described several different types of “player role” that could be taken on in an alternate reality game. What different roles were described? What role do you (think you...
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Friday Fun #18 Let’s Go F1 Racing
It’s coming up to the end of the Formula One Grand Prix season, so what better way to spend the weekend than doing a bit of F1 driving ourselves? Enter the Puma Racing advergame, a game designed to...
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Ad-Supported Gaming
One of the most influential business models – for web companies at least – over the last few years has been ad-supported publishing. So it is not surprising that adverts are also being used to generate...
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Making Casual Games Pay
Like many other creative industries, the games industry is not just about helping people have fun. It’s an industry, made up of businesses, and those business exist to make money. In the post...
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The Technical Cost of Persistence
One of the most compelling features of many games set in online virtual worlds is that the game world is persistent. That is, life in the game world goes on, even when the player is not there. When the...
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Friday Fun #19 Let’s Make a Movie
A recent post reporting on the 2008 Machinama filmfest on the Game Set Watch blog (The State Of Machinima, Part 2: The Machinima Filmfest Report) mentions, in passing, how in certain respects machinama...
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Friday Fun #20 Net Safety
For games that are sold on the UK High Street, the PEGI classification scheme allows purchasers to check that the game is appropriate for a particular age range, and also be forewarned about any...
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Digital Worlds – The Course
Digital Worlds – Interactive Media and Game Design is a free learning resource on computer game design, development and culture. Originally authored as an experimental approach to the production of...
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Scripting With the Game Maker Language
Although Game Maker’s visual environment provide a friendly interface to many users, some people (particularly experienced programmers) may find it more natural to construct programmes using the text...
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Accessible Gaming
One of the things that a great many games have in common is that they are visually rich and actually require a keen visual sense in order to play them. In this post, I’ll briefly review the idea of...
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