Tag Archives: game design

“Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage” Ashgate Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series

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I have written Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage (Ashgate Publishing, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series ), it has now gone to their production team and I hope it will be published roughly mid 2015.

Introduction: Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage can be seen as a collection of chapters designed to provoke thought and discussion, or it can be seen and used as separate chapters that may help class debate in courses dealing with the Digital Humanities, Game Studies (especially in the areas of Serious Games and Game-based Learning), or aspects of Virtual Heritage. While there are very few books in this intersecting area, the range of topics that could be investigated and debated is huge. My primary target groups of readers are those academics and students who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities. In particular I want to investigate re-occurring broad issues in the design, playtesting and evaluation of serious games/ playful learning/game-based learning for interactive history and for virtual heritage.

Chapter 1: Digital Humanities And The Limits of Text provides a reasoned argument for the preponderance of text-based research in the digital humanities but argues for the importance and relevance of non-text based projects and three-dimensional media that augments rather than replaces text. It also proposes ways of improving classroom knowledge via spatial media.

Chapter 2: Game-based Learning And The Digital Humanities asks if there should there be a manifesto and singular definition of ‘game’? Should we be more open-minded in defining games and applying them totally or in part to historical and heritage-based simulations? Do definitions of ‘games as systems’ or as ‘procedural rhetoric’ offer enough guidance in developing and evaluating historical simulations and virtual heritage projects? In answering this question, the chapter includes suggestions gleaned from three case studies.

Chapter 3: Virtual Heritage focuses on intersections between Virtual Reality, Games and Digital Humanities. Is Virtual Reality still relevant? I argue that the increasing power and superior accessibility of computer games has already absorbed much of traditional Virtual Reality. Has Virtual Reality merged into games, is Virtual Reality within the financial and technical reach of non-expert users? If so which Virtual Reality techniques have become mainstream and accessible? What is the future of Virtual Reality and how will it affect Digital Humanities, are there specific areas we should focus on?

Chapter 4: Game-based History And Historical Simulations surveys games used for history and historical learning. Which theories can help us design and critique for history and heritage-based projects? Serious games research typically use modified computer games as virtual learning environments. Virtual heritage projects typically aim to provide three-dimensional interactive digital environments that aid the understanding of new cultures and languages rather than merely transfer learning terms and strategies from static prescriptive media such as books. As an intersection between the two fields, game-based historical learning aims to provide ways in which the technology, interactivity, or cultural conventions of computer gaming can help afford the cultural understanding of the self, of the past, or of others with mindsets quite different to our own.

Chapter 5: Virtual Heritage And Digital Culture covers definitions and major issues in Virtual Heritage. I propose six general aims for virtual heritage and I suggest three key concepts, inhabited placemaking, cultural presence and cultural significance. I also suggest objectives that a scholarly infrastructure should undertake to improve the field.

Chapter 6: Worlds, Roles And Rituals explores the nature, purpose and attributes of worlds, role-playing and rituals. Why are definitions of world so difficult to find? How can worlds be realised via digital simulations, can role-playing in computer games be developed further? Who should be able to read and interpret and perform rituals and why? Part of this chapter was initially published as an essay in the International Journal of Role Playing (Champion, 2009) and the passage has been considerably modified.

Chapter 7: Joysticks of Death, Violence And Morality is a theoretical attempt to outline types of violence in computer games and develop a short framework for types of interaction in virtual heritage projects. What is violence, how is it portrayed in games and are there particular issues in virtual simulations? This chapter sketches out both factors leading to violence in digital heritage projects and reasons involving their widespread occurrence. Finally I will suggest alternatives to violent interaction when applied to digital heritage projects.

Chapter 8: Intelligent Agents, Drama and Cinematic Narrative discusses Selmer Bringsjord’s ideas on interactive narrative and whether we can provide alternatives that help develop dramatically compelling interactive narrative. Why has storytelling been so difficult? Why is the Star Trek Holodeck so widely cited but no one has come close to building anything remotely similar?

Chapter 9: Biofeedback, Space And Place discusses ways in which biofeedback and brain controlled interfaces and theories of empathy and embodiment can be used to develop games and simulations for history and heritage based games. How can we better integrate new research into the body and the brain and recent technologies that incorporate the senses or further integrate recent technologies with the environment?

Chapter 10: Applying Critical Thinking And Critical Play summarizes the arguments and findings of the chapters and proposes a quick way of validating critical theories about gaming. Can game-related projects and teaching leverage critical thinking skills? The chapter includes a sample checklist to determine whether a critical position and argument about gaming has merit.

Visiting Fellows to work with me at Curtin University in Visualisation, 2013

3D and game editors, Academic, Architecture, Biofeedback, design, Digital Humanities, game, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , , , , , , , , ,

I am very happy to announce that two Visting Fellows and two Early Career Visiting Fellows will work with me in October and November on various projects.

They are (and please note, dates are provisional):

Visiting Fellows

 

Nov 4-27: Dr Jeffrey Jacobson, http://www.publicvr.org

To provide examples of interactive and immersive environments featuring architecture and archaeology of the ancient world, to run inside Curtin’s new visualisation facility, iDome, Stereo Wall, and/or possibly the Wedge. Upload and run public VR 3D models inside UNITY on the iDome. These are the Virtual Egyptian Temple, Living Forest, Theater District of Pompeii. Prototype ancient heritage sites to run on the 0.5 CAVE (actually it is a Wedge). Design and pilot evaluation environment for potential use in humanities subjects, including history, and the visualisation undergraduate degree.

Nov 16-Dec 16: Dr Rob H. Warren, Canada, http://blog.muninn-project.org
Link 3D models in virtual environments (Unity real-time engine) to the archival databases to create a specific pilot of a World War 1 simulation using accurate historic geo-data, weather data, astronomical data, and historical records. Design and pilot evaluation environment for potential use in humanities subjects, including history, and the visualisation undergraduate degree. Link to colleagues in New Zealand and Canada to discuss potential research collaborations

Early Career Visiting Fellows

Nov 4-11: Andrew Dekker, University of Queensland http://itee.uq.edu.au/~dekker/ OR http://uq.academia.edu/AndrewDekker

We will work together on the following project: Camera tracking and biofeedback for indirect interaction with virtual environments. This project will connect biofeedback devices and camera tracking devices with equipment in the Curtin Data Visualisation Facility (CDVF) and provide a research platform to evaluate how biofeedback can be a meaningful interaction component for virtual environments, especially for augmenting socially believable agents, and to enrich the apparent “life” and “atmosphere” of digitally created architectural environments.

Nov 18-25: Dr Hafizur Rahman, Bangladesh http://bdheritage.info and http://ttclc.net

Create a streamlined 3D model data and 3D virtual environment workflow, analyse and comparing different image modelling tools, and explain how their optimal deployment for community web portals of digitalised cultural heritage.

Acquiring 3D models for artifacts is always expensive, as it typically requires a 3D laser scanner and relevant training. However, 3D modeling of small artifacts is possible to produce with photographs using low cost software such as 3D Som Pro (http://www.3dsom.com/). This software can produce 3D wire mesh and baked images for rendering, which can later be use as a source for augmented reality application for interactive public display. Free AR Toolkit /BuildAR can be used here for making this interactive display for museums/heritage institutes and interested community groups who currently lack high end technological resources and related skills.

We will also compare the above to insight 3D (http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/), which is free and open source. We will produce schematic workflows, incorporating Blender 3D for modeling and we will consider alternatives such as Google SketchUp.

Postdoc / Visiting Fellow opportunities

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I am not sure this is news for this site, but I have been lucky enough to be awarded a Massey University Research Fellowship (URF) which will pay for teaching relief for a semester in 2011. My university in its wisdom only supplements sabbatical or study leave research overseas, so I intend to look for an appropriate visiting fellow/scholar/professor roles in other countries next year. That may mean in 2011 this blog will hibernate a tad. Anyway, I’d appreciate knowing of opportunities in cultural heritage and new media, virtual heritage, digital architecture and design, interaction design or game design. I am also more and more interested in collaborative design and learning, not just because I am speaking on the topic in a few weeks here and next month in Italy, but it truly is fascinating (edusim, wave in a box, multi-touch, group biofeedback and camera tracking etc)! Ok, back on topic, under this post I will accumulate links to related visiting fellow and postdoc opportunities-I have trouble finding appropriate ones so I am assuming I am not alone.

why virtual heritage?

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Reality-based games a step closer

The WOW! Factor

By Virginia Winder –Taranaki Daily News

Last updated 11:11 29/07/2009

The Forbidden City is virtually empty. Chinese tour guides, wearing red traditional costumes, wait for visitors.

Chinese tour  guides, wearing red  traditional  costumes, wait for visitors. An  Imperial woman glides past the  guides and through the  Meridian Gates to explore the  city alone. Every now and then  she passes an official attendant  or another tourist, whose  meaningless name floats above  his or her head like a sign. For a  few seconds, someone with a  number for a name and dressed  as an Imperial guard circles the  woman, then slides away.

Our woman joins a quick tour about dragon architecture and finds herself in an outer area where archers are practising. She quits the tour, checks the map and winds her way through to the Hall of Mental Cultivation and gets lost in time and the detail of the buildings. All this is accompanied by the sweet swirling sounds of Chinese music. For this is not a real tour, but an IBM-created journey that can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world.

Erik Champion, Massey University associate professor of new media, recommends having a look at the virtual Forbidden City, because it shows how much work is involved with his area of interest and expertise: virtual heritage design.

Champion, based at Massey’s Auckland School of Design at Albany, says the virtual world is not just the domain of games. He believes software developed for gaming holds huge potential.

In his research and teaching, Champion has used digital tools to create websites and interactive games on Mayan civilisation, Marco Polo’s travels and Egyptian gods. He prefers people to roam freely. “People get bored with tours – they’re probably too passive for people. I’d like to design a personally discoverable world where you can choose the interactions, the way in which you approach the site and the way you are viewed by others.”

This would be game-like, but with more intellectual outcomes. He also talks of “augmented reality” and “biofeedback”. The first relates to physically visiting a site wearing special glasses that would enable drop- down graphics to appear in your field of vision and these would change and be refreshed as you turned your head. They are being developed and used at Canterbury University’s HIT Lab, where researchers are working on interaction between computers and humans. Champion envisages using augmented reality to see the past.

“If you were standing on a sacred site, what used to be there would appear on your glasses, or maybe it would be projected on to fog between you and the real site.

“Imagine seeing the Pink and White Terraces or the spirit trails of ancestors leaving Cape Reinga – all these things we don’t normally see.”

Champion wants to help New Zealanders tell their own stories.

“I would like to create the tools and technologies so local people could design it [the world or vision] themselves.”

He’s even keen to teach people 3D, animation and programming skills so they can go forth and create using advanced tools like curved mirrors, screen warping and biofeedback receptors. If a person is playing a game or visiting a heritage site with biofeedback, physiological reactions like pulse, skin temperature and sweat can be measured by a computer, perhaps even unknowingly through a joystick or mouse.

Champion cites a New Age meditation journey, which induces people to become calmer. This is the opposite of a zombie game recently tested by a PhD student. In that game, the more stressed the player became, the more the living dead attacked the avatar (the character or identity you become when playing a game or entering a virtual situation – like the tourist became a Chinese Imperial woman).

Biofeedback holds exciting possibilities for learning about other civilisations and even religions, Champion says.

He likes the idea of using it to affect people’s states of mind in a virtual environment. However, he would prefer people got feedback that helped them stay calm. “The more calm you are, the more the world becomes obvious to you. And the more reflective you are, the more interesting things will happen.”

Champion says it would be possible to create a virtual Buddhist temple with biofeedback.

“Only when you really calm down and really slow down will you discover things.”

He imagines the avatar would levitate or have great wisdom revealed.

“It’s a bit like interactive cinema.”

Another idea he’s been working on involves people having to learn to be like the locals. This is the inverse of the Turing test (see Freaky Facts) and involves a person in a virtual world trying to convince the scripted characters he or she is an artificial intelligence like they are.

“That way the test is on you, the human, not the computer. Why would you want to do that? Because then the human players have to learn to act like the locals and learn the culturally appropriate way of behaving.”

By proving they are not imposters, the human player would learn all about the customs, history and stories of the virtual world. This would be particularly valuable if it were a heritage environment.

“You could create an inter- cultural language game whereby if you say different words correctly, things appear to you as they did to different cultures.”

Champion has just returned from a Fulbright-funded study trip to the United States, where he presented his virtual environment research at many universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Now Champion is seeking more post-graduate students to help develop software and their own ideas. The Forbidden City link is http://www.beyondspaceandtime.org/FCBSTWeb/web/index.html#link=

MiT 6: in Transition paper (exclusive!)

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I did not get the paper for my abstract published at the main site next to my abstract — too late or quality control 🙂 — so I have uploaded the paper on future interactive uses of biofeedback here. Please don’t cite as I may change and submit for publication…

UPDATE: CURRENT PAPER VERSION AT MIT 6 CONFERENCE WEBSITE. Click on the hyperlinked title of the abstract to view the 5mb PDF.

Game academics, FIGHT!

Conference,

I can’t say I really know if this is a genuine polemic punchup or a cleverly disguised troll a melange, but it certainly is interesting.
Ian Bogost attacks Roger Travis’ escapist article for (I think) attacking him and others for creating game studies as a discipline to rule them all, rather than retreat back to the warm feverish embrace of “mainstream culture” (whatever that is).
It all derives from “Opinion: Ceci N’est Pas Une Gamer” so perhaps one needs to read that first.

I guess I came across this as Associate Professor Roger Travis is a classics scholar using (designing?) games for history-based learning…

“I can’t stand gamers.
No, that’s not quite true. I can’t stand the concept of gamers.
And no, I’m not some anti-gaming nutcase …
Hell, I like videogames so much that I’m doing a friggin’ PhD in game studies.
– Douglas Wilson, in GameSetWatch, April 2008

Should we care if Douglas Wilson, a doctoral candidate in game studies, hates us? I think we have to…The problem with game studies – the thing that gives rise to opinions like Wilson’s – is that the effort to create and maintain the discipline is keeping gaming from winning the respect it deserves. Against all appearances, scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture.By pretending that game studies stands alone as a unified discipline rather than at the nexus of various other fields, scholars of game studies (and those of departments that call themselves things like “digital media studies”) are institutionalizing exactly what Wilson feels: antipathy to the real culture of gaming. The more entrenched the notion becomes that gamers are abnormal and defective, the longer it will take for real works of art like Sins of a Solar Empire, BioShock and, yes, even Halo to vindicate gaming as a worthwhile pursuit.”