Teaching & Education Software

Riverleap, an iPhone and iPod game
Coming Soon!

Riverleap (screenshots): a fast-action platformer where your speed accelerates time. You burst as a mutant minnow from an irradiated egg into a lush, treacherous 3D river world. Bob, weave & leap incredible heights over bears, hilly boys, gar, and harpies of a mutant South. The procedurally generated world is configured differently each game to give you hours of fun! Near-instant load times make quick, exciting game sessions. Built with the Unity engine.

Augmented Reality Mobile Games

Augmented reality mobile games funded by Cartoon Network and Motorola that extends the Fusion Fall universe, a MMOG for 8-14 year olds. In the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech we are research and developing a range of AR iPhone games: puzzles, platformers, shooters, and outdoor games. To build on the strengths of mobile AR these applications encourage at least four modes of device manipulation: aiming, scanning, inspecting and observing.

chARm

chARm for iPhone: Want to feel needed... really needed? But also want to turn that feeling off at the touch of a button? Try chARm, a free iPhone app for kids about a wearable VR puppy. Pet puppy to wake him up and love you! Pet him again to make him sleep and stop eating your arm! App has not been approved by Apple.

Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture
Brian Schrank [contribution 75%] and Jay Bolter
Under contract for publication by MIT Press.

Based on my PhD dissertation started in 2006 entitled, Play Beyond Flow: A Theory of Avant-garde Videogames. Videogame artists, tinkerers, activists, and players in the 21st century are continuing, yet redefining, the avant-garde project of the art and literary movements of the 20th century. Videogames are diverging as a social, cultural, and digital medium. They are used as political instruments, artistic experiments, social catalysts, and personal means of expression. A wide spectrum of game works and events such as alternate reality games, gallery installations, griefing, arcade sculptures, and so on, can be better understood when compared and contrasted to Dada and Russian Formalism during WWI, abstract expressionism and Brechtian theater before and after WWII, Fluxus and the Situationists in the post-war era. Historical Modern painters played with perspectival space rather than only in it, similar to contemporary videogame artists who play with flow rather than only advancing flow as the popular ideal. Videogames occupy a unique cultural position: tremendously popular kitsch, a product of advanced digital technology, and at the same time a playful, reflexive reconfiguration of that technology. It is the audacity of imagining certain videogames as avant-garde (from the perspective of mainstream consumers and art academics alike) that makes them a good candidate for a critical experiment such as this.

Mashboard Games

A research project started with Jeremy Rogers where we "affordance mine" the common computer keyboard for its play-enabling properties. These videogame prototypes ask players to rub, twinkle and mash the keyboard instead of typing on it. They are awkwardly liberating to play as players renegotiate their relationship to the keyboard on a more physically playful, body-friendly terms. I coined the term "affordance mining" to mean:

The process of researching a technology to determine underutilized actionable properties and leveraging those properties into innovative forms of interaction between the actor and the technology (this is discussed at length in my book: Avant-garde Videogames).

The term "affordance" was popularized by Donald A. Norman

www.MashboardGames.com original brainstorm

BragFish: A Party Cellphone Game

A multiplayer augmented reality action game. Players use mobile devices to cruise virtual boats around a (physical tabletop) game board and catch virtual fish. The game explores new concepts in physical and social interaction and co-location. Game design document.

To be published in ACM Computers in Entertainment magazine (was ACE 2008 paper): "BragFish: Exploring Physical and Social Interaction in Co-located Handheld Augmented Reality Games"

click icon for gallery

DART: The Augmented Reality Puppy

An interactive virtual puppy rendered on top of a live video stream. Fiducial markers (an image printed on a piece of paper) control Dart's movements and actions. For example, an image of his food (or fire hydrant if he has to pee) can be moved anywhere in the camera's view and Dart will trot over to it and chow down his virtual food. I co-initiated this project with the Augmented Environments Lab with Maribeth Gandy and Jay Bolter. Game design document: "Dart and the Charms of Destiny."

 

Kotodama: The Power of Words

A role-playing videogame in which students learn Japanese (using a PlayStation2 controller and microphone). The core agency of the player is expressed through her voice in speech recognition. The better the player can speak and understand Japanese the more power she has in the game. I organized the team of graduate students working on it and was the creative director of the project.

FAQ's, GDC 2005, website, gallery

A videogame parody about the legal confusion surrounding the creation of remix works. The player adds sound loops and dancing imagery over Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Continuous feedback indicates what laws are being broken and the degree of the violation (trademark, copyright, or right of publicity). The aim is to stimulate interest regarding the chilling effects artists face when creating composite works due to ambiguous copyright laws. Fun Fact: In 2009 my old web host Bluehost said this game breached their Terms of Service and they closed my account. No Bluehost this game does not facilitate intellectual property theft.

Play online (load takes a minute)
It may run faster if you download it (30 mb) as a .rar or .zip and launch it in a web browser.

Gamespace is an unfolded hypercybe.

7D Asteroids - prototype

A 3D adaption of Atari's classic Asteroids game. Gamespace is recursive like the original game (exiting from the top means entering from the bottom). There is a central quadrant of space that is repeated on each of its six sides. This means the player's ship is visually duplicated in every direction he looks.

Download prototype - play instructions - plays in Firefox or IE but you need to install 3DVIA player

Atomic Platformer - prototype

A platformer prototype where all matter consists of pulsing spheres. Objects, floors, and walls are atomized and must be physically manipulated to traverse space, entrap enemies, release items, defend oneself, and so on.

Download prototype - game instructions - plays in Firefox or IE but you need to install 3DVIA player

Videogame Poems

Created with Processing.

Click thumbnails to play. Please allow a moment to load.

Vengeance

A short and campy videogame in a futuristic dystopia where the player slays robotic samurai to avenge his murdered mother. The interface is a head mounted display and a motion-tracked sword. It was built in two weeks in a collaborative project with three other students from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. Introduced in the BVW show by Randy Pausch:

Bu Rai An

A videogame in hell wherein the player regains his soul by slaying undead samurai attacking from all directions (360 degrees). The interface is a head mounted display and a motion-tracked sword. It was a collaborative project with three other students from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. Introduced at the BVW show by Randy Pausch:

Saturday Night Shenanigans

A videogame comedy in 1918 America in which the player is wrongly accused of ogling a brutish man's wife. Box him to retain your honor, "lest you be pummeled and defamed as a boondoggled scoundrel!" The interface is a desktop display and keyboard. It was a collaborative project with three other students from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.

Eyes of the Emperor

A physically dangerous dice challenge game, Eyes of the Emperor, pits two players in an escalating series of battles. You win when you pluck out the eyes of your opponent.

game instructions (PDF)