A RESEARCH PROJECT AT THE FUTURE APPLICATIONS LAB, VIKTORIA INSTITUTE
IntroductionIn a university course we recently supervised, students were given the assignment to create games for handheld computers that require players to share their displays with each other to advance in the game. The play area in the games was distributed across several screens, and players had to move their in-game character to the other displays to succeed. We call these games Collaborative Games since players are required to collaborate with each other to manage the sharing of the displays. In a user study the Collaborative Games were handed out to high school students at a local café. Based on the results from our study, we believe that the use of shared displays in mobile computer games has the potential to introduce new interaction models, which have not been previously explored in literature. The game was created using the GapiDraw mobile game development platform by Develant Technologies - www.develant.com
MovieYou can download a movie of the game "in action" here (Quicktime MPEG-4)
ContactJohan Sanneblad, johans@viktoria.se If you want to know more about the platform used to create the game, please visit Develant Technologies at www.develant.com
ResultsFull Papers "Why is everyone inside me?!" Using Shared Displays in Mobile Computer Games OpenTrek: A Platform for Developing Interactive Networked Games on Mobile Devices Short Papers Designing Collaborative Games on Handheld Computers
DownloadsThe OpenTrek binary distribution includes the game Pac-Man Must Die! (see below) and will be available for download shortly at www.opentrek.com
Pac-Man Must Die!Pac-Man Must Die! is a collaborative game created using our OpenTrek platform for two or more players. The game is a "reversal" of the classic arcade-game Pac-Man, which had the main character (Pac-Man) chased by ghosts of different colors. Here, each player instead controls a ghost and must collect "dots", while at the same time avoiding being captured by yellow Pac-Man monsters. To win the game, the player must collect all the dots matching the color of her own ghost. However, some of the dots are located on the displays of other players’ devices! The player can enter another person’s handheld display by using “doors” at the edges of the map. Each door has a unique color, matching the color of another player’s ghost. When a player has entered the display of another computer she has to look at the other user’s display to control her ghost. There are a total of ten different levels in the game, each with a unique layout. Each handheld device represents a unique virtual world to the other devices. The game is entirely peer-to-peer, so players can join and leave the game session at any time. Pac-Man Must Die was created by Alexander Jaako, Annelie Lundén and Staffan Lönn. The game is included in the binary end-user distribution of OpenTrek.
Collaborative Games In UseTo see how people would respond to and use Collaborative Games, we installed the game Pac-Man Must Die on six HP IPAQ Pocket PCs with Wireless LAN PC-Cards. The handheld computers were handed out to high school students (ages 16-18) at a student café, and no instructions on how to play the game were given. Since the games were designed to encourage people to communicate with each other while playing the game, we recorded everything that was said during the evaluation. For two weeks, two researchers sat at the café, handed out handheld computers, recorded audio and took pictures of the high school students playing the games (see the M. Sc. thesis "Collaborative Games" by J. Larsson and J. Skårman for more information). Below we show some of the pictures taken during the evaluation.
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