Playtest

In my thesis chapter on Tangible Interface Videogames, I make the point that one of the main uses for tangible computing systems seems to be to bring computation process into board games. In this video, a table-top role playing game becomes a game-table-top role playing videogame:

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

I went to the football on Saturday night, and thankfully my team (go the Dons!) got away with the win even though they were decidedly patchy at times. We were sitting in the midst of a large group of passionate Carlton supporters, which is to say that there was a lot of yelling directed at the umpires and the Essendon players. Even though we were high in the top tier of the MCG, well beyond audible range of the players on the ground, several of the spectators continually physically pointed out possible passes to players when their team had the ball, or opposition players to mark when they didn’t.

I’m not criticising them mind you, I’m quite animated when I’m watching at home when there’s no one to see me, but it reminded me of a gameplay video I’d seen a while ago for Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for the Wii, where you can use the Wii-mote to select players without the ball and tell them to run somewhere by pointing to it, among other things.

I speculate, but given that many sports games have something of of spectator’s perspective, looking down onto the playing field, and one that is particularly televisual that makes use of instant replays and television commentators, who are forever telling me that the shot I just missed was an ‘easy’ chance, I wonder if this pointing mechanism will be fairly easy to master, even though parts of the video itself look quite chaotic (about 1:50 onwards) with cursors going everywhere.

I’ve been a bit distracted today, there’s live music and DJs on campus for orientation week or whatever it is, though at least the music has been turned down now. As its a bit difficult to concentrate on reading with the noise instead i’ve been thinking about the structure of my thesis, and while I have a fairly clear idea about the content I want to include, at least in a general sense, mapping out how the different conceptual areas relate to each other so far hasn’t led to an immanent structure emerging, but rather the question of what theme to emphasise and as a result inform the structure. At the moment I think the concept of the interface, widely defined, is probably the best choice. It can elucidate the relationship between the body and the word, the player and the videogame, videogame space and actual space, and between players. The problem of course is that if the concept becomes too widely defined it may lose some of it meaningfulness.