The gaming think tank “Project Horseshoe” solve in their own words “Game Design’s Toughest Problems”. In an outline of a group discussion they held on a 2006 gaming conference they write on “the creation of radically new game experiences”.

“In an effort to bring experiences generated by games much further then they have gone today we considered a variety of new or different approaches to game design; approaches which are not currently well understood within game design circles. By presenting these approaches we hope to enable further discussion in an effort to expand the tools available today.”

They come up with digital and thinking tools accompanied by game examples that cover new possibilites for the creation of new game experiences. One approach is the reducion or aggregation of significant senseble information to build new experience structures. Based on the fact that your surroundings can always be read in more than one perspective.

“There is a social bandwidth of information present in our lives that normally isn’t included in a game. By understanding what these are and finding ways to include them, we can make our games richer interpersonal experiences.”

Another approach ist the Temporal Emotion Engine: it “‘reads’ the emotional content of a scene, based on generic parameters like rapidity of user input or density of movement and characters in a scene, as well as custom-designed input factors which can be scripted by the developers using the tool.” Such an approach could make clever use for kind of tools, like hiding features, that are not suitable for non-power users.

Read much more at the Project Horseshoes Website.

New tools to play with from Google. They come up with a new application, that fills the gap between web and the desktop PC. Google Desktop is a mixture of the good old google search functionality and the Apples Dashboard application from the OS X Leopard. This tool highly extends the option of collecting local and webbased data to customize your web experience. An addition you can add gadgets to the toolbar like task management, showing on- or offline-fotos or a notepad.

Linger at the plugins-site or read about ten great uses for Google Desktop.

The research study VisualID incorporated automatic generated icons as a visual assistance for browsing files. The basic idea is, that people can recognize shapes more easily than filenames. At the first sight this approach might seem arbitrary and confusing, but if you work in a workspace, you might get a relationship to the symbols.

The FAQ says:

“A major principle underlying this work is that, while ‘meaningful’ icons would be ideal, people actually have little trouble learning to recognize arbitrary icons and their relationship to content. Learning and recognizing somewhat arbitrary appearance and associated information is something that is often done instantly and effortlessly in the real world, and learning icon appearance does not appear to be an exception to this phenomenon.”

A collection of tools, that can connect your iPod to instantly useful use. On windows I tested PodPlayer. It streams the music from a USB-connected iPod to the PC – immediate delivery. Besides some tunig facilities (for example showing the battery loaded state in numbers between 0 and 500 istead of a grafic icon) you can extract the audio-files stored on the iPod to PC. The only thing that is missing at the PodPlayer is the ability to copy mp3-files from the PC onto the iPod. The .exe-file of PodPlayer is about 500kB in size, so always carry it with you on your iPod.

A similar tool like the above is Ollie’s iPod Extractor for Mac, aimed to extracting tracks from the iPod to the computer.

If you don’t want iPods limitation of audio volume, use goPod.

And in my opinion the most interesting solution is RockBox. Beside the silly name and little bugs and the loss of the great iPod navigation RockBox gives you the best control ever on your iPod. You have easy drag and drop mp3-file management with the iPod connected to the USB on the computer, as well as access to all technical data on the iPod even when playing tracks. All versions iPod should be available. Sometimes RockBox crashes for the need to reboot. But where to open the iPod and remove the battery? Indeed. No good thing when this happens at the train, because you have to run the pod out of power and than gentle kick the USB-Plug into it to refuel the tank and reboot.

Features



* 8051 microcontroller running at 24MHz

* Reprogrammable from DS

* Free development tools available

* 18 I/O lines, 2 status LEDs

* UART with RS-232 level converter (can be disabled)

* Full-speed USB 2.0 device

* PWM and ADC available

* w/ 2-axis accelerometer (tilt sensor)



Documentation and a few sample projects will be published by Dec. 11th. Everything will be open-sourced.

Go shopping it at Natrium42.

Update:

Thanks to Jos, who made an exellent review/tutorial.
The DSerial Wiki also features projects made with this hardware.

The DS Motion Card is a three-dimensional montion sensor for the Nintendo DS.

“The DS Motion Card contains a Kionix tri-axis accelerometer and single-axis gyroscope that communicate with the DS using SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) on the DS card.

The accelerometer measures acceleration in all directions (both gravitational acceleration and acceleration caused by a change in velocity). The gyroscope measures angular rotation rate (speed of rotation) around an axis perpendicular to the bottom screen of the DS.

Custom software turns the sensors on, reads the accelerations and angular rate, and controls the display based on the sensor readings. Functions to communicate with the sensors have already been written and are simple to integrate into any existing or new projects.”

The motion sensor fits tightly into the DS and allows you to play ‘physical driven games’, for example ball games or similar things. Unfortunatelly only homebrew is supported, because the device is not supported for official Nintendo stuff. There is also a similar device for the Game Boy Advance available, called GBAccelerometer. Unfortunatelly I don’t know if this device is also supported for the GBA-Slot in the Nintendo DS.

The project experimentalgameplay still continues. They wrote a paper called: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. It was written by four grad students, who has made more than fifteen games in one semester.

“Rapid prototyping can be a way of life!”

The paper list some very interesting insight, for example “Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality). You only need a few days. It seems like a natural and comforting thing to say, ‘Hey we made a great game in one week. Therefore, if we spend TWO weeks, it will be TWICE as good!’ Of course this isn’t the case.” or “Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent”. Keep on reading there.