Introducing tangible NFC games
Mon, 2011-10-17 13:56With the arrival of Nokia’s new NFC-enabled phones, we have released a suite of casual games, developed at Nokia Research Center, to demonstrate how NFC opens up a whole new category of mobile games not possible before. These “tangible” mobile games let you and your friends play with physical objects in the real world, and bring the natural and social fun of traditional family and party games into mobile gaming.
Over the weekend we released our first three games: Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle, and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. You can play these games with any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone (i.e., the Nokia C7-00, C7 Astound, 600, 603, 700, and 701), and a few NFC tags.
These games are designed to work without having to read or write to the tags. (The phone only needs to detect the tags.) This means that aside from blank NFC tags (which you can order from some online sellers), you can also use NFC cards that you may already have in your wallet -- including “contactless” or “tap”-able transit cards, ID badges, etc. And, you can use the same tags or cards for any number of other tangible NFC games in the future.
We hope to publish these games to the Nokia Store soon, so your feedback would be very helpful. We are particularly curious to hear about how easy or hard it is to get enough tags or cards to play with in different places around the world. (Note that if you have a few tags or cards but not enough, you can try pooling tags with your friends.)
Finally, while we hope you enjoy these games, our real goal in releasing them is to show the potential of NFC. From here, there are so many possibilities, especially in educational games, family games, and social games. These first games may be simple, but think of them as just the first seeds or sprouts in a whole new field of games enabled by NFC.
Thanks for trying our games, and we're looking forward to your feedback.
Luis Sarmenta
Nokia Research Center (Silicon Valley)
Comments
I like the idea of NFC, but the games demonstrated in this video certainly doesn't sell the idea to me!
Tapping cards instead of flipping them? Seriously?
Tapping a teddy in places shown in the display? You must be joking, right? That would be a 'game' for Chimps or children so small you wouldn't trust them to not smash the phone...
The Word game COULD be elaborated to make more sense. Speaking out the words also could make it a game for early readers.
We love NFC - www.nfc-hub.com Powered by Nokia!
The place to get the tags to play the games!
Also the system enables you to track usage, opening a whole new level of gameplay!
@EskeRahn Thanks for your comments.
Re: tapping instead of flipping, the real advantage is that you can play with 200 flags with just a few cards. Or, the software can vary the content any way it likes for that matter. In the traditional game where you are just flipping, you are limited to having only as many flags as you physically have cards.
The Nursery Rhyme and Shakespeare games do actually speak out the verses. We can apply a similar technique to the Word game too.
If you haven't tried these games, please do try them out let us know what you think. They are "tangible" games, after all, and best experienced rather than watched on a video.
best regards,
Luis
@AshleyBolser, Thanks. I've added a mention of NFC Hub in More Info, just in case people find it helpful.
Please note though that for these games, we do NOT want to track usage while you are playing. These games are just for fun (and education). They are meant to be private, and not related to advertising or anything like that. We do not collect any data at all (regardless of what kind of tags you use with the games).
I think your suggestion may apply to business owners who are NFC Hub's clients. Basically, if you are a small business owner and you have reason to order NFC Hub's tags for your business (with no regard for these games), then as a completely unrelated side benefit, you can TEST these games with the same tags. Our games do not alter the tags, so the tags will still be good to use for the NFC Hub service after playing the games.
If this sounds confusing, I suggest you try playing the games so you see how they work. Let us know what you think (in the main Discussion forum, not here).
(And again please note that there is no usage tracking while playing our games, even if you are playing with NFC Hub tags. Your usage is completely private.)
best regards,
Luis
@lsnok
I can't try them out, since they are not supported by my old N97mini
...nor by my next phone... ;-)
Best Regards
Eske Rahn