PAXsims

I teach a couple of programming courses in Sheridan’s Game Design degree, and I’ve been looking at some interesting toys called Phidgets. These are neat little boxes that allow you to connect sensors and control electronics directly in C#/Unity and Processing (Java), the two languages I teach. 

When I say connect and control, I mean the rather effortless: you connect the box(es) by USB and ta-da you have the data, zero electronics skillz required. No breadboards, no soldering, no fiddling with resistors, no having to understand how to turn voltage into 1s and 0s or events.

Phidgets make a number of devices for sensing and driving motors, which have all kinds of alternative controller potential for digital games. For Serious Games and wargames, the one that seems most interesting is the RFID read/write Phidget…that is, the RFID box next to your office door that lets you open doors, but USB’d to your computer, which lets you:

• detect and read low-frequency RFID tags
• write ~24 characters to a writeable tag (depending on the protocol)
• send 5V into something when a valid tag is detected (…opening doors, for example)
• show red/green lights when a valid tag is detected (handy as “tag has been read” feedback)

Tags come in credit card, button, keyfob and 30-18mm disc sizes.

But what kind of serious games can you make with a door-opener?

With about five lines of code, you can trigger an event in your game when a tag is detected…which you can use to make anything happen, really.

Here’s a lovely example from a museum, using tags hidden inside physical artefacts to cue up media content on a monitor.

The data isn’t stored on the tag, the tag’s unique ID is used to decide what to do in the program, the same way a button press, or keyboard input, is used.

This opens up all sorts of possibilities for physical/digital interactions. You could make Her Story, but instead of interrogating a database, now you have to physically find the clues.

You could make a working Pokédex like a total nerd for Halloween, so that your students can catch ‘em all IRL…or catch some, at least! I’ve been reliably informed that these four knock-off Qokémon plushies are not, in fact, all. (Pixel art and animations by parter-in-crime Prof Rocco.)

What else could you do with them?

Well…really nothing that you couldn’t already do with mouse/keyboard/controller input. The point is just the ability to encode specific functions to a tag ID to make the input more intuitive or immersive or tactile: 

• playing a card onto the reader literally causes the thing to happen. This lowers the barriers to entry for players who don’t have to learn to drive the software running the game to play complex roles in the game.
• the tag can be embedded in something. Just like RFID tags are used to check in and out library books, in-game items can be used to track, invoke, or unlock game content without breaking player immersion, without players even being aware. Or by making physical aspects of the game (visiting specific places, or finding specific items) relevant. There is something magical for players when a physical thing seems to break the 4^th wall and drive the computer.

These are all things that the control team can manage, but tags make more players, or more content, manageable, or reduce the management load to cue up preset branches of the plot.