Immersive Graphical Environment
The gameworld is a 3D space, photorealistic in quality but varying in its degree of abstraction. The world will contain physical features at various levels of scale, from arbitrary point charges floating through atoms-wide charged rings to abstracted real-world examples (the silk handkerchief/rod demonstration of static electricity springs to mind, as does a magnet moving through a current-carrying ring). The interface will be simple, with meters representing life force and charge; but as mentioned before, the notion of superimposing layers of information on the navigation window falls out of the narrative’s metaphors of visualization.

SuperCharged! can be modeled with most commercially available 3D gaming engines. The primary challenge will be adapting the game engine so that the particles behave in accordance to the properties of charged particles. Because giving players an intuitive feel for the behavior of charged particles is the primary goal of the game, it is essential that the engine be created to render the behaviors of charged particles realistically. Dr. John Belcher has the equations for these models, but we would need to integrate them into the game engine. Fortunately, these laws are all known relationships that have already been quantified, so coding them shall be relatively easy.

A second technical challenge will be in deciding what level of fidelity to portray the visualizations. Dr. Belcher’s visualizations are computationally intensive, and we will need to make trade-offs in fidelity and playability. We feel that it’s important to provide multiple visualization schemes for the concepts presented in the game; the ability to separate the essential data presented in a problem from its representation is a vital one that video games seem uniquely poised to take advantage of. From a graphical standpoint, then, the game will fall somewhere between the psychedelic abstractions of Rez, the view-switching power of a 3D modeling program, and the freedom-of-movement of Descent. Rendering-wise, little new technology is called for; the innovation will come in the area of interface and interactivity.

Sound as Information Conduit
The aural channel is the most underutilized information pathway in games; yet today’s sound hardware offers unprecedented control over a game’s audio environment. For our purposes, spatialized sound, combined with the intuitive qualities of musical shapes, will be used as an alternate ‘visualization’ method. It is a simple metaphorical leap to represent distance to a point, for instance, as the volume of an individual musical note. Three such sources arrayed in space readily form a chord; the sonic characteristics of the chord then change as a player’s location shifts relative to the points.

From this principle we can move to other aural metaphors; in one level of our game, a darkened space might require the player to navigate entirely by sound, with a 3D audio system representing the relative strengths of point charges by their pitches or timbre (there are already plenty of musical precedents for mapping the width of vibrato, for instance, to the intensity of a note or passage). From an educational standpoint, mapping a concept onto multiple representational schemes makes sense; for experienced gamers accustomed to entirely ancillary sound effects, this offers an attractive gee whiz factor. And the uniqueness of a sonic-navigation challenge will hopefully inspire greater engagement on the part of all players.

Evocative Interaction Model
SuperCharged! asks the user to interact with the world in slightly backward fashion: rather than moving through space and affecting it independent of the character’s state (as in a typical first-person shooter), the player makes changes to the world’s basic qualities, which affect her ability to navigate through it. Since an object of the game, from a pedagogical standpoint, is to impart understanding of a system’s effects on a ‘test particle’ (in broad terms, an avatar with set qualities), it makes sense to structure the player/world interaction around a more direct manipulation of the rules. But the fast pace of a racing game can still be maintained, in spite of the increased complexity of this model (watch the string of various rapid actions in a frenetic passage in Deus Ex, for instance).
Straightforward Adaptation to Multiplayer

Though we envision SuperCharged! primarily as a single-player game, it maps readily to a multiplayer experience. The attraction of a multiplayer game would be different from that of the single-player version, of course; increased tempo combined with the deliberately constrained style of gameplay would, we think, produce a compelling experience quite different from a more scattershot model such as Quake. Real-time strategy games show that multiplayer games can keep up a brisk pace while still engaging players at both the tactical and strategic levels; the notion of ‘turning on’ physical laws over time (moving from the concept of an electric field to EM waves, for instance, or ‘enabling’ the concept of induced magnetic fields as an additional gameplay wrinkle) could make for a multifaceted single-player and multiplayer experience, given how closely the player’s game-state (closeness to victory) and the characteristics of the gameworld are tied.

Copyright 2002, MIT.