ProjectProposal-SeanCarr
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Description
One of the few tasks I prefer using pen and paper for, rather than a computer, is playing games. Most people today think of video games with advanced graphics as the primary type of game, but I still love old games that you can play with a friend and all you need is some pen and paper. These are very popular games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Nim, and my favorite Dots and Boxes. Because these games are so popular there are tons of applets available to play them online and even research groups which have developed software to solve and analyze them (GamesCrafters). Even though these games are readily available on the computer and even through networked play with others, I still prefer a face to face matchup which involves passing a notepad back and forth while watching the other player think about what move to make. Additionally, these games make long trips more agreeable.
This is why I propose combining the benefits of playing these games using pen and paper with the additional tools available on the computer, specifically the GAMESMAN software package from GamesCrafters. GAMESMAN has many features that are specific to playing the game in their program, but it also has some interesting post-game analysis tools. The main tool that exists currently is called "Visual Value History" and shows a graphical representation of how good each move was that a player made during the game. The idea of this project would be to import the game played using Anoto pen and paper into the GAMESMAN system and use the software to add various affordances that the paper game does not have. This could include basic statistics, replaying the game, finding where key mistakes were make and learning from them, and much more.
Target User Group
The possible users of this group are anyone who plays paper based games of this variety (2 player, abstract strategy). This group is much to large to target as a whole so it would probably be a better idea to specifically target people within this group that would be likely to use game analysis tools such as GAMESMAN. These would generally be people who are comfortable with simple computer games and are highly interested in either playing such games to win or in the mathmatics and science behind them. This is still a fairly large and hard to identify group so to simplify things even more I think it would be best to focus initial efforts on people who are already comfortable and familiar with the GAMESMAN software suite and who love games and the math involved. This group is very easy to identify and gain access to since it is fairly limited to the current and past members of the GamesCrafters research group.
Context and Forces
There are two major aspects of this project:
Physical to Digital
This is where the pen strokes are converted into a GAMESMAN formatted representation of the game that was played. There are lots of details here beyond the scope of this document but needless to say this is a very hard task and involves adapting to infinitely many possible user inputs. In this stage we have to think about how the user will be entering the data and how that will affect the drawing of the game. There will have to be game specific intelligence at this stage to determine if the pieces should be Xs and Os or lines and boxes. Even the board will have to be recognized since we dont want to limit the users freedom on the page by constraining them to a preset area.
GAMESMAN tools
Currently the GAMESMAN program has few post-game tools and does not yet have the ability to load in data from a game that has already been played. This means that additional tools and functionality must be built into the system. One major feature that should be added is the ability go back to any point in the game by clicking on that position in the Visual Value History graph and replay the game from there.
The analysis section should give more background for the problem. What aspects of the situation might influence the problem solution? Think about location, time, environmental factors etc. Then think about aspects of the user group, their education, available time, motivation, values etc., What related or complementary solutions exist already?
Similar Projects
Tic-tac-toe has always been a popular paper based game but there are now a huge number of computer versions available. There are also sites which describe how to play the paper based version and even "special pens" you can buy that are "designed" to be used for playing tic-tac-toe. It didn't seem like there are any sites for products which bridge the gap though between the paper game and the computer game, even for one of the most popular paper based games in the world.
The Fly pen seems to have some games for it but they seem to be more specialty games which accent the features of the pen.
Sketch
The idea is for people to be able to play games in a very freeform way on paper just as they do today and leverage the Anoto capabilities to import that game into GAMESMAN for added value. A perfect example of this would be a scanned copy of the games I played with my father on our family trip to Idaho this summer, but since I do not have a scanner I will only be able to use the photoshoped examples below. This would have been a great time to have an Anoto pen.
The strength of the proposed game interface is that it is not new and doesn't require special drawings or syntax (as currently imagined) and especially not pre-printed pages which lock the user into playing specific games in a specific way. It may be that we need some additional information to specify things like which game is being played since many games share the same board layout, but as proposed the system should be able to recognize a sheet containing games of say dots and boxes played by two users who weren't even aware they were using the Anoto system.
This shows the transition from a game of Tic-tac-toe on paper to the corresponding game that would be loaded in GAMESMAN. Notice the graph on the left side of the game which shows how "good" each move way. This is also illustrated in the graph below.
This is a close up of the visual value history after a game of Ice Blocks. It is easy to see when the three mistakes were made during this game because a winning (green) position is given to the other player when the current player already had a winning position. There are various other visual clues in this graph that give you information of the game and hopefully more will be added.
