An new idea to develop an alternate and passive game control is not to use the physical objects but images of the specific objects. You can categorize the images and assign them to several game tasks.
In a discussion I had with my professor an idea came up to use image recognition through the camera of your mobile to identify specific objects. These objects are arranged as classes which are used to control a game: e.g. specific colors or shapes of an image.
Another way to categorize images is to use keywords. The image hosting website “Flickr” enables user to tag and browse photos “by folksonomic means” (wikipedia). You can connect images with certain topics “such as place, name or subject matter” (wikipedia) by using tags.
This approach necessitates a meaningful classification of the images which is mapped on the game tasks again in a meanigful way.
Below you can see information about technologies used in the turn based strategy game “Civilization IV“.
As you can see images and keywords are already used to describe different technologies in the game. This is one example which can be used as a meanigful classification or indexing.
What other games/game mechanics can be used for this approach?
- customization of Civilization IV
Civilization IV allows you to change easiliy game data like events, units terrain etc. Barry Caudill, Senior Producer at Firaxis Games wrote an article on the Civilization IV developer’s blog in which he describes three tools: The World Builder, XML an Phyton.