First-person Cinematographic Videogames

Abstract

We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

Defining Configurable Virtual Reality Templates for End Users

“…While we cannot consider them as full VR experiences, they share the immersion and the need to define how to react to the user's interactions. In this field, Blečić et al [5,14] propose the solution closest to the one we present in this paper. They created an authoring tool for designing point-and-click games limited to 360 • videos, defining the behaviour through rules.…”

“…For instance, Barricelli and Valtolina [4] exploit them in an interactive visual system for the collaborative management of IoT sensors for improving the quality of life and promoting wellness awareness. Blečić et al [5,14] created an authoring tool for point-and-click games, whose logic is defined through a set of ECA rules following a natural language representation. The environment supports the editing through a set of drop-down lists, guiding the user in creating the rules.…”

“…We support the definition of composite expressions in the language specification, but in the implementation of the rule-editing interface we support only one level of and/or on simple checks to avoid clutter. The solution resulted in a useful compromise between expressiveness and the interface usability already validated in other tools [5,14].…”

“…The only distinction we assume in the categorization is between objects and behaviours. The other pieces of information about the category or behaviour type name, the list of state variables, and the exposed actions are included as metadata in the component class implementation, declared as C# custom attributes 5 . Given such a structure in the implementation, the following is both the description of how we defined the taxonomy in Section 3.1 and of how third-parties can enhance the set of available categories.…”