The Nexus: Computer Game Interfaces for the Real World

1 BACKGROUND/MOTIVATION Most non-electronic games are designed for the physical world we live in and to make effective use of 'real world' properties, such as physical objects, our sense of space and spatial relations. Our sensory engagement in the world adds texture, context, and content to the game play. Computers inarguably offer exciting possibilities to the design of games but they also transform the way we play and interact within a game context. Perhaps most notably, they in some sense turn play into activities in which players are disengaged from the physical world rather than interacting within it. Computer games, while often designed to mimic the physicality of real world spaces and objects, typically do not allow for the same richness in interaction as offered by the real world. It is sometimes argued that it is the game industry that pushes the development of new hardware technologies and software techniques (cf. Bushnell 1996). However, computer games, particularly those that are designed for personal computers, are nevertheless carried out on machines with interfaces optimized for office work, such as word processing. Despite the powerful machines that personal computers are, it is easy at hand to argue that an interface optimized for tasks such as word processing, compromises its suitability for gaming applications. Further, the PC is personal, and as such has been argued to effectively shield the user from the social and physical environment by demanding an excessive amount of foreground attention from the user. There are no reasons why this phenomenon does not apply to computer game applications, even in multi-player games where absorbing social realms can be created through the facilitation of a network. People are still primarily interacting with a computer rather than with other people, or engaging with the physical world. A compelling research task is to find alternative interfaces for computer games. This paper describes the Nexus project, in which we research the design space of computer games that employ, as well as affect properties of the real world. The ultimate ambition is to create an out-of-the-box computer game, where the points of interaction are not confined solely to a virtual game world and the personal computer interface, but also has distributed and tangible interaction aspects that support the execution of the game. In other words, we envision future computer games that are experienced in physical and social environments where players to with the real world.