Project Goals

Our goal is to provide first and second year University students with a simple game that allows them to build the intuition and understanding of pointers as used in high level languages like C/C++. An educational game online could help motivate and engage these students to participate in a meaningful and educational activity and to explore key concepts outside of the classroom. Putting their theory into practice reinforces the theoretical elements and aids in their retention.

Friday, May 16, 2008

HCI Design Innovations in Entertainment Software

One of the four innovations of games this paper introduces is
"fluid system-human interaction -- games communicate information to users in ways that do not demands the user's attention and do not interrupt the flow of work"

From some of our game reviews, we decided that a real-time game would not be as successful at presenting information. In case we change that assessment, here's a couple points made on the system-human interaction that seem to be much more relevent to real-time and strategy games than turn-based or puzzle games (although there may be some elements that are transferable).

Calm Messaging
Unobtrusive messages do "not require users to dismiss, acknowledge, or address them." This allows the system to give the user messages while not necessarily interrupting them. Examples:

  • Audio -- prerecorded voice messages, or sound notifications
  • Transient text -- disappears on its own (scrolling messages, automatically removed)
  • Animation -- draws the user's eyes to a specific place (event notification in a mini-map)
These are, however, ineffective for out-of-game critical messages.

Attention-aware interface elements
Context-aware view behaviours

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