Work Related to Game Design

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Video game design is a budding research area that sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, graphics, software engineering, and art. Here we look at various trends in game design research.

Open Ended Gaming

The Grand Theft Auto and Crazy Taxi series have popularized the idea of open ended gameplay. These games simply present the user with a virtual world to play in rather than tell a story through a series of events. Many MMOGs can be considered open ended games.

  • Rock Star Games is the creator of the Grand Theft Auto series. While the game has received a lot of negative press about the violence and crime that it features, the series has been extremely popular.
  • Pirates is an OLD game for the Atari that is perhaps among the first open ended games. This is a true classic. The game has been updated into 3D and released on the XBOX an PC.

Augmented Reality Gaming

A recent trend of game design research takes video gaming out of the living room and into the real world. Augmented Reality mediates the gamer's perception of the real world and injects elements of the game. In this way, new and interesting interface techniques borrowed from ubiquitous computing can be applied to game design in a way not possible before. The following are some examples of AR gaming:

  • Human Pacman is an AR game developed at the Mixed Reality Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This game is based on Pacman, but the game is played over an entire city with multiple players. This work was demoed at CHI 2004 in Vienna and presented in an alt.chi session at CHI 2005 in Portland.
  • ARQuake is an AR adaptation of the popular Quake first-person shooter developed at the University of South Australia.
  • A-Rage is a game engine designed specifically for AR Games.

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