GDC 2010, Day 1: The Missing Middle
Real World Gaming, Microsoft Surface, And More
Real World Gaming
What happens when you apply game development techniques learned when developing Diablo III and World of Warcraft into the real world? You get MyTown.
Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah, the developer of MyTown, gave a talk filled with interesting insights into the increasing overlap between virtual and real worlds. MyTown is an iPhone app that allows you to “buy” real-world real estate, like your local Starbucks or H&M. You don’t really own it, of course, but you are competing with others who are bidding or buying up these real world assets in a virtual way.
Lee covered some fascinating examples of using gameplay techniques in applications with real-world implications, like Nike+ and Wii Fit. Booyah’s own application, MyTown, currently has 1.3 million registered users, who spend an average of 70 minutes a day in the game.
Lee painted a somewhat frightening, yet strangely compelling universe of “smaller, tighter compulsion loops” to keep players engaged. MyTown’s business model generates revenue both by brand partnerships (as with H&M clothing stores) and micropayments by players for virtual goods.
Is this the future of gaming--turning the real world into a giant Skinner box, treating players like hamsters eager for the next virtual food pellet in exchange for real dollars? We can only hope for a backlash.
Game Design For Microsoft Surface
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Microsoft Surface is a pricey PC with five embedded webcams and a huge, massively multi-touch display. It’s literally a tabletop computer.
Microsoft presented a talk on designing games for Surface. Interestingly, Surface was originally called the “Microsoft Playtable,” and was originally oriented towards early childhood education. So, gaming was always in the cards for Surface. Demos were shown of the Dungeons and Dragons prototype developed by Carnegie Mellon graduate students and several arcade titles by Vectorform Game Studios.
What’s interesting is how Surface illustrates, in a large scale way, some of the real-world game interactions that are becoming memes of game developers these days:
- Using Surface seems more natural than working with a PC. Surface removes a layer separating PC from user, those ubiquitous input devices like mice and keyboards we all love and hate.
- Microsoft Surface is “massively multi-touch.” We’re not talking about two or three gestures, but up to 52 touches occurring simultaneously. This enables more robust, real-time multi-player experiences. One example shown was a Scrabble-like letter tile game using physical tiles. Each tile was pre-registered with Surface, so it knew which letter the tile represented. Players could move the tiles around in real time, form words, and modify words. And multiple players could all be doing this simultaneously.
- Surface is inherently multi-user. This opens up new possibilities, like multi-player pinball, and Vectorform’s Galactic Alliance, a multi-player, real-time tower defense game.
- Surface recognizes objects that are placed on the screen. Since it can recognize objects (there are five cameras, remember), objects exist in full 3D space. Physical objects on the screen can be used as blockades, attractors, weapons, mirrors, refractors, and more.
Currently, the price of Surface--$15K or more--is still too high for most home users. But the developer’s kit is free, and apps can be tested on more limited multi-touch interfaces available on tablet PCs. Dev kits are downloadable right here.
More To Come
GDC is really just getting started, so drop by and check out further reports on the show in the next few days. We’ll talk more about highly multi-threaded games, Civilization V, Borderlands, and more.
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Onus nVidia, please take a Bullet for the team. Let PhysX die, and embrace a shared, open standard.Reply
ATi, if it will help them swallow a bitter pill, do your 3D their way.
To get the best features, I don't want to be limited to only certain games based on whose GPU I bought. You'll fracture the PC gaming market, and I really don't see how that is in anyone's interests. -
rad666 jtt283nVidia, please take a Bullet for the team. Let PhysX die, and embrace a shared, open standard.ATi, if it will help them swallow a bitter pill, do your 3D their way.To get the best features, I don't want to be limited to only certain games based on whose GPU I bought. You'll fracture the PC gaming market, and I really don't see how that is in anyone's interests.Reply
I second the motion. -
JohnnyLucky Interesting developments. I don't think the major players really want to share unless it is absolutely, positively necessary.Reply -
bitterman0 jtt283nVidia, please take a Bullet for the team. Let PhysX die, and embrace a shared, open standard. ATi, if it will help them swallow a bitter pill, do your 3D their way.To get the best features, I don't want to be limited to only certain games based on whose GPU I bought. You'll fracture the PC gaming market, and I really don't see how that is in anyone's interests.rad666I second the motion.It's called "competition". And it is considered a norm to have two or even more (in extreme cases) competing technologies to become "standard". After a while only one technology remains and becomes a de-facto standard. Nothing to get yourself worked up about, really.Reply -
falchard Since nVidia does not have the performance crown, they most likely will be unable to push a closed standard like PhysX or nVision. Any game developer who uses such technology will do so at a dive in the total amount of customers they can have.Reply -
shin0bi272 I thought amd didnt want anything to do with physics... are they scared of nvidia's physx now or something? All of a sudden they are pushing for an open source standard when 3 or 4 years ago when ageia was up for sale they wouldnt touch it with a 10ft pole. Seems amd is scrambling to find a solution that will benefit them equally with their competitors because they screwed up and are now covering their asses while pointing their finger at nvidia saying that a hardware dependent solution is unfair etc etc.Reply -
Trueno07 Ahhh i love seeing this.. Rebirth of the PC and with it, new and flourishing competition.Reply
Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. -
Onus Oh, I'm all for competition. Compete on price and performance though, not on a mutually exclusive feature set that forces uncomfortable choices. People complain about game quality now, how do you think it will get when developers know they're only writing for that portion of the market that uses {ATi | nVidia} ? Ugly. Or compete on a value-add. Write a driver that uses one vertical column of pixels at each edge as a sort of "sound level meter," so those of us who are deaf in one ear (or entirely) will know where the sound is coming from; stuff like that.Reply -
I don't see any reason for nVidia to drop PhysX, since Bullet will run on the GeForce chips just fine using OpenCL or DirectCompute, but if the game supports PhysX then nVidia can get a boost in performance since that's specifically designed for their chips.Reply
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Isnt the Xbox "Microsoft" Natal compatible with windows? Wonder how many games will support it.Reply