- Email: [email protected]
Splish, splash games with the water controller
TECHNOLOGY / Video games being produced directly by the game, they are being produced by what players are reminded of by the game. People write me emails about how they cried and how they thought about their girlfriend, or their wife or their childhood being gone. Those are the things that are actually triggering the emotion.
Richard Foulser/trunk archive
Is triggering emotion something that mainstream games don’t do?
Better living through gaming Games can be used to challenge our perceptions of the world, designer Jason Rohrer tells Jacob Aron Can video games affect a player emotionally or change the way they think about the world?
Games can make people think about things in new ways. They present players with a model of a real-world system. By playing, people can come to understand how the model works and therefore something about how the real world works. This gives them insights that they might not have had if they just read about it in a book, say. Profile Game designer Jason Rohrer lives in Davis, California. His games include Passage, which explores life, death and happiness, and Chain World – a game designed to imitate a religion – which can only be played by one person at a time
26 | NewScientist | 10 March 2012
How did you achieve that with a game like Passage?
I’m not necessarily sure Passage was intended to create an emotional reaction – I intended it to explore the trade-offs that are inherent in a finite life. At first it seems simple; it is about a little guy walking in a maze. Then he slowly starts getting older, his clothes start changing and his hair starts thinning. The changes are so gradual that most players don’t notice until about halfway through – which is kind of like real life isn’t it? At some point in your 30s or 40s, you look in the mirror and go “oh my god”. That was intentional, and that realisation harks back to people’s experiences in real life. The emotions that people are experiencing aren’t necessarily
Most of the emotions in mainstream games are things that happen in non-interactive movie sequences. You’ll come to a point in the game where a little scene will play, where other characters in the game will come and talk to your character, or some character will die in a tragic moment. I see that as an uninteresting way of trying to deal with emotions in games. Can artificial intelligence systems that automate the design process (see page 23) help to create new ideas?
It is an interesting question. In my case, if I’m designing a multiplayer game, I’m directly applying mathematical game theory. I could imagine that process being automated in some way. The vast majority of the game design space is totally unexplored, and we as human designers have trouble escaping the shadow of games that came before. An automated system would not have that same bias.
Splish, splash, swirl to operate water controller REMEMBER the good old joystick? From touchscreens to the Kinect, how we play video games has changed dramatically in recent years. Now there is an even more exotic way of controlling games – a bowl of water. Developed by Luc Geurts and Vero Vanden Abeele of the Leuven Engineering College, Belgium, the Splash Controller is a wooden bowl with electrodes covering its inner surface. Filling the bowl with water completes the circuit and activates the electrodes, allowing a computer to detect the presence of liquid and interpret a variety of gestures including swirling the bowl or splashing water into the air. With just 5 volts passing through the water there is no chance of electrocution. So far Geurts has only created a simple pattern-recognition game for use with the controller, but he says it should soon be possible to control an on-screen character by sloshing water back and forth. Future possibilities include smart water-based toys for children or games designed to help people with motor disabilities by teaching them to manipulate the controller. Geurts presented the controller at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, last month. Jacob Aron n
How else might developers push the boundaries of gaming in the future?
I definitely think we should stop putting so much effort into better graphics. In a lot of ways, the resources spent there are wasted. The future is in people fully exploring possibilities and not getting stuck in the ruts that are present in terms of genres and so on. We need to be working on games that have never been done before, which is what I try to spend my time doing. n
Chris Stein/Stone/Getty
Insight Virtual life
Richard Foulser/trunk archive
Is triggering emotion something that mainstream games don’t do?
Better living through gaming Games can be used to challenge our perceptions of the world, designer Jason Rohrer tells Jacob Aron Can video games affect a player emotionally or change the way they think about the world?
Games can make people think about things in new ways. They present players with a model of a real-world system. By playing, people can come to understand how the model works and therefore something about how the real world works. This gives them insights that they might not have had if they just read about it in a book, say. Profile Game designer Jason Rohrer lives in Davis, California. His games include Passage, which explores life, death and happiness, and Chain World – a game designed to imitate a religion – which can only be played by one person at a time
26 | NewScientist | 10 March 2012
How did you achieve that with a game like Passage?
I’m not necessarily sure Passage was intended to create an emotional reaction – I intended it to explore the trade-offs that are inherent in a finite life. At first it seems simple; it is about a little guy walking in a maze. Then he slowly starts getting older, his clothes start changing and his hair starts thinning. The changes are so gradual that most players don’t notice until about halfway through – which is kind of like real life isn’t it? At some point in your 30s or 40s, you look in the mirror and go “oh my god”. That was intentional, and that realisation harks back to people’s experiences in real life. The emotions that people are experiencing aren’t necessarily
Most of the emotions in mainstream games are things that happen in non-interactive movie sequences. You’ll come to a point in the game where a little scene will play, where other characters in the game will come and talk to your character, or some character will die in a tragic moment. I see that as an uninteresting way of trying to deal with emotions in games. Can artificial intelligence systems that automate the design process (see page 23) help to create new ideas?
It is an interesting question. In my case, if I’m designing a multiplayer game, I’m directly applying mathematical game theory. I could imagine that process being automated in some way. The vast majority of the game design space is totally unexplored, and we as human designers have trouble escaping the shadow of games that came before. An automated system would not have that same bias.
Splish, splash, swirl to operate water controller REMEMBER the good old joystick? From touchscreens to the Kinect, how we play video games has changed dramatically in recent years. Now there is an even more exotic way of controlling games – a bowl of water. Developed by Luc Geurts and Vero Vanden Abeele of the Leuven Engineering College, Belgium, the Splash Controller is a wooden bowl with electrodes covering its inner surface. Filling the bowl with water completes the circuit and activates the electrodes, allowing a computer to detect the presence of liquid and interpret a variety of gestures including swirling the bowl or splashing water into the air. With just 5 volts passing through the water there is no chance of electrocution. So far Geurts has only created a simple pattern-recognition game for use with the controller, but he says it should soon be possible to control an on-screen character by sloshing water back and forth. Future possibilities include smart water-based toys for children or games designed to help people with motor disabilities by teaching them to manipulate the controller. Geurts presented the controller at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, last month. Jacob Aron n
How else might developers push the boundaries of gaming in the future?
I definitely think we should stop putting so much effort into better graphics. In a lot of ways, the resources spent there are wasted. The future is in people fully exploring possibilities and not getting stuck in the ruts that are present in terms of genres and so on. We need to be working on games that have never been done before, which is what I try to spend my time doing. n
Chris Stein/Stone/Getty
Insight Virtual life