Wind Bugs
This project is an attempt at developing a new form of gaming based on hybrids between computer games and board games. To find the limits of this kind of hybrid gaming platform, efforts has been made to develop a game that captures the best of both of these two worlds.
The game has been designed to uphold a high level of social interaction as in a traditional board gaming session – while at the same time providing some of the advantages of computer games. The computer game qualities that has been implemented in the game is connected to the automated handling of events in these games – this contributes to the fact that computer games can be very complex – but at the same time be easy for beginners to get started with. The result of these attempts is Wind Bugs – a computerized board game.
The game is based on a gaming platform where each player holds a mobile phone that is used to interact with a common “game board” that is visualized on a computer screen. The board runs a Flash application that communicates with the mobile phones. The use of mobile phones enables games where the players operate with private information that the others are not supposed to share. The private information feature is known in close to all card games as well as in many board games of the modern era. This feature, though, is difficult to implement in a computer game / video game without breaking the rich social interaction of a board game session – if the players use monitors that are separated over a network they will interact through the devices rather than around them. The gaming platform is produced with Extransit’s mobile application editor.
