Stephen Boyd Davis

‘Ere Be Dragons: heartfelt gaming

Abstract A new pervasive digital game is discussed, relating technical and conceptual innovation. A combination of sensor technologies enables a responsive visual and auditory environment to be overlaid on the real world. This allows processes within the players body to be mapped to the environment through which the player passes, externalising the internal. Rather than using technology to replicate the rigid goals and structures of many conventional games, this game explores the concept of ‘open play’, a form of personal exploration. The work is an interdisciplinary collaboration between digital artists and health scientists with an agenda to alter players’attitudes to the body and health as well as to break new ground artistically.

Smell Me: Engaging with an Interactive Olfactory Game

The paper describes an artistic project which produced some valuable findings in relation to olfactory interactive design. It records a process of discovery in a largely unfamiliar area of interaction. The paper describes how the many difficulties which people have in discriminating, recalling and identifying smells were used as the substance of engaging gameplay. Both theoretical and practical issues are discussed, including the role of olfaction in creating a sense of complete realism, and its use to create affect and to promote engagement. Issues of specifying and controlling odour are discussed, as are problems arising from the nature of olfactory perception. A digital olfactory game is described and evaluated. The paper may seem to undermine the whole idea of using the olfactory channel, and leaves it an open question how useful olfaction may eventually prove. It is admitted that significant problems await the design of olfactory experiences.

'Ere be dragons: an interactive artwork

The paper introduces a pervasive digital artwork which harnesses live heart-rate and GPS data to create a novel experience on a Pocket PC. The aims of the project, the technologies employed and the results of a preliminary trial are briefly described.

Just in time: defining historical chronographics

The paper is historical in two respects, both concerned with visual representations of past time. Its first purpose is to enquire how visual representations of historical time can be used to bring out patterns in a museum collection. A case study is presented of the visualisation of data with sufficient subtlety to be useful to historians and curators. Such a visual analytics approach raises questions about the proper representation of time and of objects and events within it. It is argued that such chronographics can support both an externalised, objectivising point of view from outside time and one which is immersive and gives a sense of the historic moment. These modes are set in their own historical context through original historical research, highlighting the shift to an Enlightenment view of time as a uniform container for events. This in turn prompts new ways of thinking about chronological visualisation, in particular the separation of the ideal image of time from contingent, temporary rendered views.

Locating Drama: A Demonstration of Location-Aware Audio Drama

Locating Drama is a collaborative project between the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University and the BBC Radio Drama department. The aim of the project is to investigate narrative strategies that utilise locative technologies, principally GPS enabled devices, without being tied to a specific location, allowing listeners to experience immersive, location-aware (but non-location-specific) dramas in suitable locations near their homes, which may eventually be downloaded as interactive pod-casts from the BBC website. The demonstration will present a working drama originally produced for the BBCs Free Thinking festival 2008.

Constructing a Player-Centred Definition of Fun for Video Games Design

Research was carried out with twenty-seven games players, using a number of techniques. This was academic research, but intended to be useful in the development of existing and new genres of game. Considering the future application of such techniques, perhaps outside academia, their cost-benefit will be important. The authors report both on what they discovered about the two games studied, and also on the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques employed.

Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction

The article explores the spatial practices of film in order to better understand the design of digital interactive media. The criteria used in the design and selection of the film image are discussed and a novel view of film as a pragmatic and highly economical form of picture making is proposed. The difficulties are highlighted of simply transferring such imagery to an interactive context, but it is argued that the same guiding principles can be applied in the newer medium. It is suggested that the demands of visual interaction are leading to the development of new pictorial modes, but that much work remains to be done. In particular it is proposed that the mature expressivity of traditional film is a goal to which designers of pictorial interactive media should aspire.

The amateur creator

Important design problems are raised in developing software for amateur users, a group distinguished here from novices. The authors argue that these design problems can be approached by understanding how systems for amateurs are derived from those for skilled users, through a combination of transformations we describe as foregrounding, backgrounding, automation, integration and constraining. Useful comparisons are offered with popular product designs. A broader, partly historical, context is then described in which media technologies propagate from use by specialists to use by these amateurs, and the latter change from consumers to creators. The discussion is focused by a description of difficulties with existing software encountered in the course of a creative schools-based project, intended to enable young users both to explore virtual worlds and to design and populate them with their own avatars. The authors argue that HCI design would benefit from a clearer grasp of the special characteristics of designing for amateur users and of transforming existing software for their use.

Screen space: depiction and the space of interactive media

The spatial properties of digital interactive multimedia are analysed and contrasted with those of pictures, and of narrative feature films and factual television. These media have developed distinctive spatial methods and questions arise concerning the transferability of such methods to other, interactive, forms. A taxonomy is proposed which reflects existing practice in digital interactive media and indicates promising lines of enquiry for the future.

Interaction and Expressivity in Video Games: Harnessing the Rhetoric of Film

The film-maker uses the camera and editing creatively, not simply to present the action of the film but also to set up a particular relation between the action and the viewer. In 3D video games with action controlled by the player, the pseudo camera is usually less creatively controlled and has less effect on the player’s appreciation of and engagement with the game. This paper discusses methods of controlling games by easy and intuitive interfaces and use of an automated virtual camera to increase the appeal of games for users.