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.

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 4×4 square slider puzzles, or the cornucopia of lame flash puzzles).

Ah well, another good app name taken.

I’m including their video here, so you can look at it now, and draw your own conclusions.  What do folks think … am I being too critical?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some folks would say this is not “really” AR, since the graphics (ghosts) are not tightly, accurately, spatially registered with the world.  Normally, I would agree;  as is obviously from my work and other posts, I think it is important to distinguish between different kinds of systems that relate the physical and virtual worlds, because different approaches have different affordances and capabilities.  I tend to call “AR” things that tightly register graphics with the physical world, because it creates experiences that afford certain things (e.g., allows people to leverage their spatial and perceptual abilities to remember where virtual things are, refer to them, perform actions in relation to them, collaborate, and so on). Conversely, I usually refer to experiences like this, that crudely position graphics in a space, as mixed reality (MR).

However, the ghost theme is the one theme that is amenable to “faking AR” on low end devices.  Over the years, we’ve done a lot of ghost-themed experiences, first on Auburn Avenue (an historic area in Atlanta) and later at the nearby Oakland Cemetery (where we had students do class projects for years in our Augmented and Mixed Reality Experience Design class).   One of the reasons ghosts “work” is that we all “know” how ghosts “behave”, and one of these behaviors is that they don’t stick to the real world, they float and shift and even appear to go through objects or walls.  Which is exactly what happens when the graphics aren’t registered.

So, the upside is, I’ll look forward to this game coming out, and like to see how it works.  There are lots of questions that remain to be answered before one can say if this will be good or not, but the idea is interesting and promising.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We also wrote a paper on the class, which was presented at the ACM Foundations of Digital Games conference. We also have a paper in the SIGGRAPH Games Track (on our collaborative AR game, Art of Defense), but I haven’t posted the final video yet (I’ll do that in a few weeks).

Finally, Kim and David improved our zombie shooter game (that I showed off at GDC); there’s a new, much cooler video, up. The game is now called ARhrrrr …

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also met with some folks from TouchArcade, a really great site for iPhone game reviews.  We talked for a while about our little iPhone game demo,and I showed them the other demo game we created on NVidia’s reference platform. They wrote a small story about our chat; the big point is that, while the current AR games on mobiles are still a bit rough around the edges, when you see what the new platforms (whether NVidia’s Tegra or TI’s OMAP3 or Qualcomm’s SnapDragon), you begin to understand what handheld AR might be like!

Not to leave out some video, here’s a short video of what I showed them on the NVidia Tegra.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And, for reference, our older iPhone pet game:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eventually, 3D position and orientation like this will just be the starting point, and the devices will use other information in the world (models of buildings, such as this system demonstrates, or the imaged-based approaches being worked on by Nokia Palo Alto researchers).  When such systems (which will require a massive amount of information about the real world, much more significant that systems like Google Earth and Google Streetview) are deployed, we can finally start doing REAL AR in the physical world.  

Some day, some day …

Engadget has a new article with details on the schedule for when we might see a new Gizmondo.  

The Gizmondo when under back in 2006 under dubious circumstances, but it’s still got some legs (especially if some of the core chips are updated, even slightly).  I have been using them in my research since the summer of 2006, when NVidia gave me my first one (they didn’t want to dish out GOForce dev kits to us lowly academics, so they gave me a Gizmondo with the technical information on the GOForce 4500 chipset inside it).

After the company crashed (figuratively and literally), it became increasingly easy to pick them up on eBay … I ended up with a dozen or so, and amazingly enough, they are STILL one of the best devices for handheld AR 2 years later (on a price/performance level).  Rugged, easy to program, decent camera, ok 3D.

Right now we’re running a course on handheld augmented reality game design using the Gizmondo, where we have a great set of students (CS and CM students from Georgia Tech, and design/animation students from SCAD-Atlanta) working to prototype AR games;  we’ll see how it goes, but the first round of prototypes were pretty descent!  

It would be nice to have new Gizmondo’s to run them on some day …

I am also really excited by this; anything that pushes handheld AR will be a good thing for those of us currently engaged in it (and it’ll give my students more job opportunities!).  There is the practical issue of creating “good handheld AR games” that are practical for mass marketing and consumption. The DS/PSP/Gizmondo aren’t powerful enough to do “real computer vision” (like the PS3 could do), and so some sort of physical props (e.g., cards with markers on them) will be needed. As soon as your start requiring props, that makes the games less portable … a conundrum to be sure.

Hopefully, some of the students in the “handheld AR game design” class I’m doing at GT right now (in collaboration with a class at SCAD Atlanta) will come up with some compelling examples and help drive interest!

And the games of 2043? “They’re not the kind of games that were developed for flat glass screens — cumbersome,” he said. “We don’t pretend that a flat glass screen is a window into a virtual world… the idea sounds silly to us.”

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’ but we don’t,” Sterling continued. “We think that reality is real — you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface.” To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal “body games” to global games and space games and everything in between — including “neighborhood games”. More importantly, “[In 2043] we’ve got 70 years of computer games — that’s what we’ve got that you don’t have — and we got it from you. All kinds of dead intellectual properties and platforms, all being continually re-released.” 

It sounds like it was a bit of a light, motivational talk, but it seems everyone is getting the AR bug these days.