2010-02-13
Surfacing the Dungeon
Hi. My name's Simon, and I've been a gamer since 1981, when I first entered the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I still play, as part of a game that's been running now since the late 80s, and which has fragmented into three or four different campaigns.
Enough of the confession to something everyone knows about me anyway. What I'm here to talk about is gaming styles...
We play using a whiteboard on a table, for instant maps. It's a technique that works well for our group, as we can quickly show the GM just what were doing - and it works for him, as he can quickly through obstacles in our way. But there's one group of students at Carnegie Mellon that have taken this approach in a whole new direction, using a Microsoft Surface table computer to run their game...
It's a logical way to do things. We've found Surface to be an inherently social and cooperative way of computing, and have used it to take part in collaborative scavenger hunt-style games around conference buildings. So why not use it as a focus for social game play?
I wonder if I can persuade the folk at Redmond to lend a surface and the CMU Surfacescape software to our GM...
Enough of the confession to something everyone knows about me anyway. What I'm here to talk about is gaming styles...
We play using a whiteboard on a table, for instant maps. It's a technique that works well for our group, as we can quickly show the GM just what were doing - and it works for him, as he can quickly through obstacles in our way. But there's one group of students at Carnegie Mellon that have taken this approach in a whole new direction, using a Microsoft Surface table computer to run their game...
It's a logical way to do things. We've found Surface to be an inherently social and cooperative way of computing, and have used it to take part in collaborative scavenger hunt-style games around conference buildings. So why not use it as a focus for social game play?
I wonder if I can persuade the folk at Redmond to lend a surface and the CMU Surfacescape software to our GM...