Digital Media Project Liam Richardsons blog about his 3rd year project

Effects of C02 on people, and how to visualise this in the game

My last post got me thinking about how to represent the user dieing. Lots of games have visual clues that a user is dieing/failing task etc, though I can mostly only think of first person shooters. (Pictures bellow) Some games have other methods, like guitar hero (as discussed in the last post) has a bar showing how well your doing, and if you fail you are boo'd of stage. In the burnout series of games, your car is shown to be getting more and more destroyed. In Grand Theft Auto the screen fades to black and white as the character is sprawled across the floor.

Here the player in doom is show to have ill health

Blood and dirt on the screen in Modern Warfare 2

Fading to black and white as you die in GTA IV

Since this is a common gaming technique I thought about what should happen in my game? Clearly the bleeding character or blood on the screen would not be suitable for my younger players. There is a lot of evidence of video games effecting children badly, and i certainly don't want to reduce my children to tears, just teach them something.

I also thought it important to make the game as realistic as possible. There's no point having fairies floating around telling you that you've died. I first tried looking into the effects of rising CO2 levels on humans, which is called Hypercapnia. This Thread on Google Answers (I didn't even know they had an answers system!) and the article on wikipedia contained lots of useful information. Ive listed some effects bellow:

• lowers the shivering threshold and increases core cooling rate
• Effects Diaphragmatic Function - Harder to breath, became tired easier
• Acidosis (Acid in the Blood) Serious and sometimes fatal
• Headache, Nausea and Visual Disturbances
• "In 1986, volcanic Lake Nyos erupted huge quantities of CO2, resulting in the deaths of approximately 1800 people and thousands of livestock up to 25 km away."
• flushed skin
• Extrasystoles
• muscle twitches
• hand flaps
• reduced neural activity
• raised blood pressure.

Studies also showed that these would only happen when CO2 was at 15,000 ppm, or 40 times the current levels, which gives me some suggestion of when these things should start taking place in the game.

During my research I discovered the article Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning By Seymour Papert, a living legend in computer science and learning. Lego even named the Mindstorms system after one of his books.

The article most talks about games aimed at learning, as opposed to informing which is the main aim of my game. Though the two are similar, there are differences (as far as i see it).  There is some good advice to take from the article though, including this quote I'd like to share:

"Frankly, I think that it is downright immoral to trick children into learning and doing math when they think they are just playing an innocent game. To make the situation worse (as if anything can be worse than lying to children), the deception does not achieve any purpose, since cooperative learners who know what they are doing will learn far better than children who go mindlessly through the motions of learning."

All this has left me with an awful lot to think about, and a lot more to read. Hopefully I can start getting some solid ideas down on paper soon.