adventure playgrounds

Adventure Playgrounds: The Coolest Places You Probably Never Played As A Kid

Reminded me of one of the articles in a previous reading assignment.

chex quest; final project notes

Today in class we discussed the modification of games like Battlezone and Doom for military purposes. Basically, the games are repurposed as military training or recruiting tools. One of the mods we discussed was Marine Doom – a version of Doom created especially for the Marines, modified to suit their purposes. So essentially, it’s just really clever product placement. This got me thinking: I remember some odd years back (way back, like, when Windows 95 was still pretty new) this game that came packed in Chex Cereal: Chex Quest. Chex Quest is a complete modification of Doom, just like the military mods. But unlike Doom or its subsequent incarnations, Chex Quest was completely child-friendly and focused on concepts like good nutrition and collecting healthy food rather than attacking demons. So while the military was busy training its soldiers and attracting new recruits, cereal companies were just as hard at work recruiting consumers via the same tactics. Hmm.

On another note, some considerations/to-dos for my final project:

• find some way to implement the “shuffle” function
• work on story concept
• determine a set of constituative rules
• research similar projects?
• maybe it’s not based in one specific area, but rather could be started from any area (based on simple rules) to create an infinite number of possibilites/final outcomes

And this is my third post here for the day. Hopefully the last one.

campus derive: ub secrets

If you’re reading this (which is unlikely since I’m pretty sure almost no one does!) please go take a look at our derive project, UB Secrets!

second life + paralysis

I found this article about researchers using Second Life in combination with equipment that lets paralyzed people control a character and move around in the SL world.  (click for article)

It’s an interesting application of the platform, I’d be interested to see where they go with this.

cool link of the day

My “cool link of the day” for class this week was vectorpark.com.

I feel that it relates to the class in that it is an interesting interactive experience that doesn’t really classify as a “game,” but rather is more like a childrens’ toy, or a puzzle. It doesn’t really serve a productive purpose other than being entertaining, though if pressed I suppose it could be used to demonstrate various computer usage skills, like basic clicking and dragging, or interacting with elements on the screen.