Research into Interactive Games

Research Log:

Consoles

Interactive games are seeing resurgence in recent years this is seen with massive pushes from games companies such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo creating the likes of the Wii, Playstation Move and Kinect.

This technology makes you the controller, instead of the old way of having a hand held controller, and allows games to interact with players in a much more immersive way.

“You'll need plenty of space to use Microsoft's Kinect motion-gaming system, but it's just about the most fun you can have with your hands free. It's not accurate enough to win over hard-core gamers, but it's simple and hugely entertaining.”

-      cnet.co.uk

 Advantages                                                      

• Accurate motion controls                                                  
• Little lag                                                                                                          
• Motion-based gaming on an HD console    

            Disadvantages 

  ·        Demands plenty of space to play

  ·         Requires a lot of space to move

 ·        Expensive     

        Other interactive games include the dance mat games which started becoming popular at the start of the millennium; the aim of the game was to follow the instructions on the screen by “dancing” gaining points. This evolved with the introduction of the Wii and other consoles where the same games were able to be played without the mat, allowing you to dance more freely.

Another interactive game that has been hugely popular is the guitar hero franchise, and it’s spin off series DJ hero, a game allowing you to imitate playing the guitar with a guitar shaped controller and you were tasked with strumming the correct colours as they appeared on screen to play the song, rewarding you points, if you missed, wrong notes would play and if you consistently failed the song would stop.

Youtube Interactivity

Youtube Street Fighter - A Youtube video game in wich you can control your character by clicking one of the 4 buttons.

The scenes were created using stop-frame animation, with buttons placed over the top. Clicking a button moved to the next scene where your character would use the attack selected.

It’s a really impressive short game, which is a string of videos incorporating every possibility which allows the player to experience multiple play-through to see them all.

This is probably the closest to our game idea which also involves stop-frame animation which is multi-ended.

 Tipex have used interactive videos to form the basis of a strong advertising campaign. It involved a story that led to to a point where the character would tell the viewer to type in what he should do next. This was a great novelty and people really enjoyed the interactivity of it with its endless possibilities, to date it has over 16 million views. They achieved this by turning the entire video dimension to look like the youtube interface, allowing them to seem to interact with objects on the screen such as the adverts to the side of the video. It’s garnered much praise and opens up a new type of advertising which pulls the viewer in much more than conventional media form