Brainstorming for the next big idea...

After the physical pong proved to be far too popular than I expected, I started thinking about other 'old and beloved' games that could be aptly ported to the  digital world of 3D interaction. Probably because I have invested too much time thinking and refining on the pong idea, and adding new elements to make it more engaging, I couldn't easily set my mind free to explore other similar implementations. Instead, I assumed it maybe more fruitful to think in reverse, that is come up with a conventional game that is played without technology and spice it up using 3D interaction. 

Additionally, I would have liked to be some kind of game that not everybody can play unless they have some kind of abilities. My mind immediately focused on people with disabilities, and I tried to think of a way to enable this group of people to perform actions and participate in collaborative gameplay, that wouldn't be able to do without the use of technology. Since Microsoft Kinect (which has drawn my attention at the moment) is eminently a device that allows rich ways of expression, I tried to think of a specific group that is at a disadvantage in this respect. The first one that came to mind were people unable to speak, since they are missing one of the most important human attributes for expression: speech.

However, I had to come up with a game that demanded expressive players; the one that immediately came to mind was Charades. Since this is a typical party game that demands, by default, body gestures I initially thought it would be a good match for a game enhanced and facilitated using Kinect. Nonetheless, in Charades the player acting as a descriptor for his team has to perform body gestures anyhow, meaning that the Kinect would have to be used for her teammates who would be trying to find the described word/phrase. I wanted, though, a game that would involve Kinect-enhanced gameplay for all players, and also would be equally enjoyable for non-mute people.

My second choice was Taboo, which is kind of the opposite of Charades. For quite a few reasons I considered it a far better application for a gesture-based alternative of a conventional game. Firstly, the players have to describe a word using just speech (no gestures allowed), which was the incentive for choosing a game that mute people cannot normally play. Secondly, it is more constrained as a game since the player has to describe one word and has a set of words she has to avoid. Lastly, all players could play using body gestures at the same time, even though this might be too challenging for the implementation.

One of the challenges of implementing Taboo using body gestures would be what kind of gestures to make for the system to understand the corresponding word. Since there could not be such a universal body languange (besides the signal language that mute people use, but wouldn't want to increase complexity that much), I thought of providing a way to the player to train the system, intead of hard-coding the moves. This way the game would be unique for each group of people, providing them with a means to customize it and associate the gestures with words, in the most optimum way that makes sense to them. Looking for similar implementation I came across the Kinectic Space (video below) which allows users to record up to 9 individual movements.

Since that was really close to what I was thinking, I download and tried the tool; I even thought that I could use it to develop my design idea. However, its limitations became apparent from the beginning: nine moves are barely enough for a decent Taboo implementation, it uses only the hands and no other part of the body, and it seemed it could not perform accurate matching of the moves every time. Nonetheless, it is a ready-made tool which releaves me from having to implement the recording, and can also record moves (1 second long) instead of still body gestures (although, this is not my priority in the game).

The idea is pretty simple: the player describing the word is performing the (trained) moves which the Kinect detects and displays the corresponding word on screen. The players who have to find the word are throwing out words by means of body gestures, too; when the right word is performed the game gives one point to the team and proceeds to the next word. If the descriptor performs a gesture which corresponds to a Taboo word, a sound is heard, the opposing team gets a point and the next word to be played appears.

Through some subsequent discussions, there was some debate that players' gestures could be directly recognized by the co-players (assuming they accurately represent a word or meaning), and eventually there would be no need for a Kinect or a screen. A counter-argument would be that it is not possible to have a meaningful gesture for every word that can be played (e.g., you can mimic a monkey easily, but not a table with a single gesture). Also each player could train the system to match different gestures with the same word, and login during gameplay in order to load her personal set of gestures. Having said all this, I understand that there is a huge cognitive load imposed on the part of each player who has to remember all the gestures that she did during training and reproduce them accurately on the 'heat of the game'! This burden, along with the limited number of words that one can actually perform and remeber, are the biggest hurdles with this Taboo implementation.

Consequentlty, I have to either address these problems with a clever work-around or come up with an alternative design idea.