Game: Virulent

Virulent is a game where you control a virus and your goal is to infect the cells of the body you're in.

The game controls are easy to understand as they are mouse-only and movement is done by drawing a line with your mouse which will be the path your virus will follow.

It includes basic immunological system information which trasnforms into gameplay mechanics. For example, B-cells will kill the virus so you must be careful when moving around. Also, as the game progresses, antibodies will start to roam around the area so you have to maneuver your units skillfully to avoid them while multiplying your virus.

The game is short, but a good example of real-world knowledge transformed into gameplay mechanics.

PLAY THE GAME HERE!

Morgridge Institute for Research (2011). Virulent. Obtained in August 5th, 2001 from http://discovery.wisc.edu/media/MIR_images/erca/virulent_web/Virulent_2011_06.html

Game: Pixel Legions

Pixel Legions is a little flash strategy game where you must control your Pixels (units) and send them to attack your opponents to kill their Pixels and most importantly, their Base.

The game is simple, your base produces pixels which group themselves. Select a group and trace a path in the environment. The pixels will follow your traced path and if they encounter an enemy, they will atack.

I like this game because it's concept is extremely simple yet it creates fun experiences because you can't just mindlessly play, you actually need to have some sort of strategy.

As the game progresses, more elements come into play, like sections that you can only cross from one side or more enemies to deal with.

It would be interesting to see a variation of this type of game where you could program your pixels and pitch them against other people's armies and see who has the best strategy.

What I liked about the game:

• The game is really easy to understand.
• It keeps you entertained by adding small twists every now and then.
• Encourages you to have some sort of strategy instead of mindless play.
• Can provide interesting gameplay ideas for a programming game.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The pixels auto-lock enemies (even if it's your enormous pixel group against two enemy pixels) which can cause some problems in advanced levels.
• Some kind of multiplayer would've been nice.

Play the game here!

Pixelante (2010). Pixel Legions

Game: Colobot

Colobot is a nifty real-time strategy game that combines programming elements into its gameplay. In this game, you control an astronaut that must complete several missions in each planet he arrives. To help him, he can build bots that can do specific things, like fly or move through the ground and pick objects.

Bots are built much like how you would build stuff in games like Age Of Empires, where you need to gather resources (in this case, energy cells and titanium blocks) and build the corresponding structures that will allow you to create your units (in this case, your bots). Colobot has a super simplified resource management system so you don't have to worry about it too much (you need 1 block of titanium to build stuff, your bots use 1 energy cell to power themselves, etc.) so you can focus on the programming part.

The cool thing about this game is that you can choose not to program anything and control all your bots by yourself, but this proves harder and harder as you progress in the game, so, just like in real life, you can use programming to avoid having to perform everything yourself. And because of this, you will also feel the joy of watching your program work, just like when your code works in real life!

The game has some faults though. The levels introduce new topics quite nicely, but trying to see which is your next objective is a chore. Instead of having an "objective complete! Next objective is...." on the GUI, you have to press F1 to see the objective list. The game won't even cross out the ones that you have completed. Also, it would be nice if the game introduced easy programming concepts right from the first level instead of presenting you with example programs. Still, this is an interesting game and one of the few if it's type that will let you to program your units OR control them yourself in real time.

What I liked about the game:

• Program OR control your units (yay!).
• Simplified Real Time Strategy style won't boggle your head.
• The programming language used in the is similar to a real life programming language.
• The games is really entertaining once you get the hang of it.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The game really needs mission status updates.
• The help system is like reading a .chm file.
• The programming language could be introduced from the start to make it easier to create your own programs.

Check out the game's main page.

Download the demo here.

Epistec Games (2001). ColoBot

Game: C-Jump

C-Jump is a board game designed to teach programming. Wait, what? A board game? Well.. yes, it's a board game and probably the only one that teaches this topic.

I found it quite interesting that someone desinged a board game to make it fun for kids to learn programming basics.

The gameplay is a pretty standard roll your dice and move your piece n spaces, whoever reaches the last space is the winner. The catch is that the board is made up of lines of code taken from the C programming language. Here's a pic of the board:

Each space line of code represents stuff that can will happen if you're standing on it when you throw the dice where X is the number you get. For example, if you are in a space that says "x+5" and you get a "3", you can move 8 spaces forward, or if you happen to land on an "if" space, the number you get will determine the path to follow.

Aside from simple arithmetic, the game also has the most common statements like if, else, switch, goto, break, continue, return, etc. The full board looks like this:

It's an interesting concept. I would need to play it to know if a game based almost entirely on luck would be fun enough to play it several times. At least, children that play it would actually be learning basic programming concepts.

Visit C-Jump's main page.

c-jump factory (2007). C-Jump

Game: Crayon Physics Deluxe

This game has an amazing concept. Like Scribblenauts, this game focuses on the player creating stuff in the world to pass each level. In this game though, instead of writing nouns to sommon stuff, players draw lines that transform into in-game objects that will hopefully make the ball reach a star.

In each level, you must draw lines, paths, boxes, circles, and more to help the ball reach it's destination. The cool thing is that whatever you draw will have complete physics effects. That means that if you draw a box, it will fall to the ground, if you draw a circle, it will roll around and if you draw a line connecting a heavy box, it will tug the line as if it were a rope.

This creates interesting puzzles for players to solve and because there are many ways to solve them, players will have different experiences when playing the same levels. And much like Fantastic Contraption, some of them will be encouraged to create crazy over-the-top scribbles to achieve the same goal, much like a Rube Goldberg Machine.

I havn't bought the game yet, but heres a video showing what it is all about:

Buy the game here.

Kloonigames (2007). Crayon Physics Deluxe

Game: SuperMe

SuperMe is an interesting concept. It's a browser based game where players' goal is to improve four different types of skills: Widom, Ability, Influence and Connection. The catch is that this will be done through the different quizzes, videos and games that the site has to offer. The cool thing is that when you get better at one of this skills, you are actually getting better in real life, because all the content on this page will make you think about yourself and your actions.

This is a type of Gamification, in which players are rewarded for learning how to be happy, how to be a better person and how to live an overall good life.

The quizzes are a bit boring, but because of the gamification aspect of the site, they are bearable. The videos are really interesting, because they are short, concise and entertaining, plus you can learn from other people's experiences. The games are fun and challenging, they make you think and improve certain skills along the way.

There is one downside though, and probably a game-breaker one. The scores reset when the page refreshes or you navigate to another page. I don't know if this is common, but I tried the game with Facebook Connect in Chrome and IE9 and both times I lost my progress. A real bummer, considering that the most important aspect of the gamification process doesn't work. Still, it's an interesting concept that will actually help people once they fix the score resetting issue.

What I liked about the game:

• Interesting concept.
• Videos are fun and informative.
• Games are challenging and entertaining.
• Registering is extremely easy with Facebook connect.

What I didn't like about the game:

• Quizzes feel more like a chore than a fun activity.
• Broken scoring system breaks the experience (should get fixed soon).

Play the game here

Somethin' Else (2010). SuperMe [www.playsuperme.com]

Game: Super Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts is a series with an awesome concept: Write anything you can think of and it will appear in-game. It sounds quite ambitious but it's actually pretty well implemented.

The games consist of a series of puzzles that you have to solve and to do that, you must use your imagination to summon stuff into the game world progress. In Super Scribblenauts, they added the ability to use adjectives so the amount of stuff that can be summoned is enormous.

I found this concept to be quite entertaining and it creates different experiences to different gamers.

Here is a gameplay montage that gives an idea of what you can do in the game

I only played this game once in a ds booth, so I will include a review from IGN instead of reviewing it myself:

Buy the game from Amazon.com

Visit Scribblenauts' website

5th Cell (2009). Super Scribblenauts

Game: Infinite Adaptive Mario

Infinite Adaptive Mario is an expansion of Markus Persson's Infinite Mario.

This game is a mario clone but with procedurally genereted levels that adapt to the player. Everyone starts at level 50 which produces levels with a moderate degree of challenge. If the player dies that number will decrease depending on how far from the goal was the player. If the player passes the level, the difficulty goes up depending on how fast the level was completed.

The level number indicates how difficult a level can be created. This is done by the frequency of gaps, average size of gaps, variation of ground height and the number of enemies.

What I liked about the game:

• Traditional mario game controls make it easy to get used if someone has already played a mario game of the same style.
• Procedurally generated levels make this game interesting, as it varies the difficulty of the game based on the skill of the player.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The game needs a menu screen or confirmation screen. Jumping right into action with enemies at 1 second from you will most surely result in death if you're not paying attention.
• A score system would increase this game's replay value and encourage competition between players.

Download the game here

Ben Weber (2010) Infinite Adaptive Mario [http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=infinite_adaptive_mario]

Game: Fold It

Fold It is a game that helps science. Instead of having a great amount of resources destined to fold proteins, they let players around the world do that. With so many players competing to fold proteins, predictions can be made of the shape certain proteins will take. Also, players could end up designing proteins that might just be helpful to cure diseases.

In this game, each level is a "puzzle" which consists on a protein that you have to fold. There are several rules that you can follow to increase your score, for example, the more compact the protein, the better score you get.

The game is quite complex but the tutorials introduce each concept quite nicely. By the end of all the tutorial levels, you'll be able to tackle puzzles with real protein shapes and compete with other people around the world for the best scores.

What I liked about the game:

• The tutorial levels introduce the game mechanics really well.
• The game helps scientists find patterns in protein folding, which will eventually lead to understanding diseases and body functions.
• The game gives you constant feedback and doesn't penalize mistakes so you can easily improve your protein folding techniques.

What I didn't like about the game:

• Because camera movement and protein movement is performed with the same mouse button (depending on where you click) sometimes I ended up moving the protein instead of the camera, effectively destroying everything I had accomplished (The game comes with an undo command, but still it would be nice to have a different button or combination of buttons to move the camera).
• Even though the tutorials are excellent, it takes a lot of time to get used to the game once you decide to try regular puzzles.

Download the game here

University of Washington (2009) Fold It [http://fold.it/portal/]

Game: Warning Forever

Although this game is not a serious game, it has a really interesting gameplay mechanic.

Warning Forever is a Top-Down Shooter game which consists on killing a boss in each level to proceed. The catch is that the boss gets progressively more difficult in each level and it will evolve depending on how you killed the last one.

If you keep killing the boss from the same spot over and over, it will grow arms on that place to make it harder to kill from that spot, or it might begin turning around as to force you to attack from a position you are least comfortable with.

If a certain weapon kills you, it is probable that further iterations of the boss will contain more of that particular type of weapon.

You can change your attack angle and make your shots narrower or wider so you can vary your strategy through each level.

The varying nature of the game, along with the need to see how the boss will evolve makes this game quite addicting.

What I liked about the game:

• Evolving bosses make this game a different experience each time you play.
• High scores encourage gamers to replay the game and reach further levels.
• Easy to learn gameplay makes it easy to pick it up.

What I didn't like about the game:

• Sometimes it's not clear how the boss will evolve, most of the time is trial and error.
• Once you figure out how the game works, it's possible to force the boss to evolve how you want, instead of the boss evolving to counter attack your strategies.

Download the game here

Hikoza T Ohkubo (2009) Warning Forever [http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/dlcount.cgi?product=wf]

Game: Lightbot 2.0

Lightbot 2.0 is a small flash game in which you have to guide a robot through the environment to light up certain tiles. You will do so by programming certain behaviors into it.

Through the game, you can either move forward, turn right, turn left, jump or turn on the tile you're standing on. For this, you have a "main program" and two functions to work with. With this, you can create loops, recursion and conditionals to achieve your goal.

What I found interesting about this game, is that you can indirectly learn basic programming logic, even recursion, which is normally a somewhat confusing topic.

The following video shows the first levels of the game:

What I liked about the game:

• Cool way to learn basic programming logic.
• Seeing your program work and improving it with trial and error helps you get better quickly.
• The tutorial explains the game mechanics really good.
• The game allows user created levels, which extends its replay value.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The GUI could be improved a little bit, sometimes modifying your program takes longer than it should.
• Turn arrows can get confusing on certain situations.

Play the game here.

Coolio Niato (2010) Lightbot 2.0 [www.kongregate.com/games/Coolio_Niato/lighbot-2-0]

Game: GWAP

Gwap is a web site created by Carnegie Mellon University that tries to make computers smart. The site contains several games defined as GWAP (Games With A Purpose) that were designed to be fun but also to accomplish tasks that are easy for humans but difficult for computers, such as tagging photos, tagging songs, separating good looking pictures from bad looking ones, tagging videos, etc.

For example, the first game you can play in GWAP is called ESP. In this game, two players are shown a picture and both have to guess a word that the other player thinks that describes the picture (much like Google Labeler). This improves web image searches by generating descriptions of uncaptioned images.

Another game, Tag a Tune involves two players listening to a song. Players must decide by the one-word descriptions if the songs they are listening to are similar or different. This will allow complex music searches like "love songs".

One that caught my attention was Verbosity, in which one player helps the other one guess a specific word by describing as much as posible everything related to the word. This helps create a big amount of facts that artificial intelligence programs can use.

Every game will give you a score and that score will accumulate cross-games in you gwap score. With this, players can compete and advance their gwap level, which creates a fun environment and encourages people to keep playing (and helping computers get smarter).

What I liked about the game:

• There's a great variety of minigames to play, keeping things interesting if you ever get bored by one of them.
• This game will help the search engines give better results.
• Short game spans allow players to play in their free time.
• Global scores keeps players interested and encourages them to play more.

What I didn't like about the game:

• Sometimes, when playing a game involving a picture, the game will present a file that has been removed, leaving you with a blank 'file not found' page which takes away all the fun.
• It can become frustrating if the other player takes too long to answer or disconnects (it's not the game's fault, but it happens, and having to wait in a game that's supposed to be fast, can make you quit it entirely).

Play the game here.

Check out the article that brought this to my attention.

Gwap (2011) Retrieved March 16, 2011 from gwap.com: www.gwap.com/gwap

Game: Fantastic Contraption

Fantastic Contraption is a really interesting game where you have to build your own machines or contraptions to make one pink ball reach the goal area.

You start building you machine in a blue area and you can place whatever you want as long as you keep your invention inside that blue area. The different pieces that you can are a wheel that turns left, a wheel that turns right, a neutral wheel that can move to either side, a wood rod and a 'water rod' (water rods can go through other rods, wood rods will collide with other wood rods.).

This game allows for an interesting trial and error experience in which you can get better and better by just playing and analyzing what's happening. Also, because of the game's nature, a single level can have practically unlimited solutions.

The following video can show how different users managed to solve the same level:

What I liked about the game:

• A really well implemented trial and error style will make it easy for someone to improve their creations.
• Players are encouraged to create amazing and convoluted contraptions just for the bragging rights of doing so, which is amazing for a game.
• Players can create their own levels, which allows this game to always have new content.
• The tutorial is well done because it introduces the game's mechanics slowly but interestingly enough.

What I didn't like about the game:

• I thought this game was well thought out. The only minor gripe i had was that very rarely, some of the contraptions you create won't make sense but still will allow you to beat the level and you will be left wondering 'how did that just work out?'.

Play the game here!

inXile entertainment (2011) Fantastic Contraption [http://www.fantasticcontraption.com]

Game: Façade

Façade is an interactive storytelling game. In Façade, your friends (a married couple) invite you to their new apartment. Everything starts up nice, but as the game progresses, discussions arise and you have the power to help them save or break their marriage.

What you can do while playing Façade is walk, grab stuff, perform a limited amount of actions on certain objects and the most important action of all: talk. You can write anything and the game will react (most of the time) accordingly.

The great thing about Façade is that you can try different approaches each time you play it and you will surely get a different experience, even the conversation tree can go in a different direction from play to play.

The AI will advance the story depending on what the developers refer to 'moment-by-moment' interactions, which makes the flow of the conversation to look natural.

I played Façade several times. In one time, I was able to discover the root of their problems and had a happy ending. Another time, I tried to flirt with one of them, which caused a lot of awkward situations. One time I was being so annoying that they kicked me out of their apartment. As you can see, there are many different possibilites for each time you play.

This game is an interesting experiment in which you can explore social interactions, but more importantly, is a good example of game AI being used to create compelling characters and interesting game flow.

What I liked about the game:

• Lots of conversation branches and the ability to say anything increases the replay value of the game.
• The characters react surprisingly well to most of the things you can say. The reactions even change depending on where you are standing in the room.
• The game's an interesting example of AI being used for character and story development.

What I didn't like about the game:

• Because of the nature of the game, you will be inevitably tempted to 'game the game' by throwing the most awkward phrases you can think of, and the characters won't react to many of them, which dissipates the illusion of intelligent characters.
• Sometimes, characters will walk through walls and furniture, destroying the otherwise well crafted suspension of disbelief.

Visit Façade's main site or download the game here.

ProceduralArts (2005). Façade [www.interactivestory.net/download/]

Game: WolfQuest

WolfQuest was created by the Minesota Zoo and Eduweb and it's a game that lets players experience what is it like to be a wolf. It was designed to provide enough scientific accuracy so players could actually learn several things about wolves, like how they interact with each other, how they hunt or how they raise a family. Their research has shown that the game has actually succeeded in both, teaching people about wolves and creating interest in wolves in general among them.

The game has a single player mode and a multiplayer mode. In single player mode, you can create your own wolf and you are left in the middle of the wild to survive. The game uses a sandbox approach, you can basically do whatever you want and experiment with different actions, and this helps the learning process because it allows players to fail without punishing them a lot. When interacting with other wolves, this actually encourages players expermientation with different actions and looking at the other wolf's reactions.

I didn't play the multiplayer section of the game, but I could assume that it's better than the single player because you can interact with other people, planning hunting tactics with other players should be better than trying to hunt on your own.

Also, this game relies heavily on the on-line community. They deliberately didn't explain many things in the game so they encourage on-line interaction with other people in youtube and their forums to exchange knowledge and strategies. I'm not particularly fond of this approach, but it can work if used correctly.

What I liked about the game:

• You can customize your avatar, choosing any gender with different colors and traits. This lets players connect more easily with the game.
• The player learns about wolves because it is required to behave like one to progress: hunting must be done, territory must be marked, pups must be taken care of and interesting interactions like 'establishing who is boss' are also necessary to progress.
• The game keeps a good balance of realism and fantasy, such that most of what you can do is an acurrate representation of what a real wolf can do.
• The social aspect of the game is cool and encourages players to talk to other people about the game and wolves in general, creating interest in the topic.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The music gets extremely repetitive after a few minutes of play.
• I understand why they decided to let some parts of the game unexplained, but for someone that is not interested in investing time on the online community, a simple in-game guidance could've been appreciated. This includes presenting the instructions in-game instead of presenting them in text windows and keyboard diagrams.
• I experienced a game-braking glitch in which the camera got stuck just after interacting with another wolf and I was unable to move. I had to reset the game.

Visit WolfQuest's main site or try out the game.

Minesota Zoo, Eduweb (2010). WolfQuest [http://www.wolfquest.org/downloads.php]

Game: Timez Attack

Timez Attack is game developed by Big Brains. It is a great advancement in games used for education, because it includes several elements from traditional games to complement the learning experience, for example, likable characters, diverse environments and interesting action sequences.

The game mainly requires you to solve multiplications. Solving multiplications serves the purpose of what could be considered a 'context sensitive button' i.e. pressing a button on a controller changes the action depending on the current context of the game character. In this case, solving a multiplication can open a door, kill an enemy, move a platform, etc.

I remember being a kid and playing a Sesame Street videogame on my NES which also had some kind of 'in-your-face' math operations (moments where it's obvious that you're solving a math question), but I remember having a lot of fun playing it. This time, however, I was having a hard time keeping interest in the game. I believe the main reason for this is that I'm nowhere near the target audience, but I still found that the excessive use of the 'in-your-face' multiplication questions interrupted the flow of the game, not as much as to break it, but that can sometimes become annoying.

Nevertheless, this is still an interesting game concept and can prove quite useful as a learning tool.

What I liked about the game:

• The game includes lesson reviews to see the student's progress. This really helps teachers and parents understand which topics have been mastered and which haven't.
• The 'retention module' is excellent to ensure the mastery of the content. There is no risk of forget
• The characters and evironments are fun. This is a great improvement over the traditional pencil and paper learning experience.
• It can truly be a fun experience for kids.

What I didn't like about the game:

• The game's main mechanic relies on the learning by repetition. While it's an effective methodology, in videogames, repetition can be counterproductive.
• The game's educational content is presented 'in-your-face'. Almost all the time, there is a gigantic multiplication written on a wall/box/enemy that you have to solve. It would be cool if this could have been a little more subtle.
• Sometimes, too many math operations can interrupt the flow of the game.

Visit Big Brainz's Home Page or try out the free version of the game.

Big Brainz (2011). Timez Attack. [http://www.bigbrainz.com/Download.html]