At the age of four, my son demands a steady diet of video games. I found out: Most tablet games for preschoolers are weak ripoffs of "Magic Schoolbus." Instead, I seek out easy puzzle games built for adults. Rovio’s “Tiny Thief” is a favorite. So is Mediocre AB's “Sprinkle Islands.” This month I've been reading about three new games that might add another dimension to the boy's digital play.
Two iPad games — one, born in Boston, out on iPad, the other, a game platform made in Palo Alto, Calif., now close to completing its Kickstarter campaign — promise to take touch-screen games off the plane of the phone and onto the kitchen table. They are Osmo, a hardware platform made by Tangible Play, and "Tiggly," a game made by an eponymous company with Boston roots. Both use the iPad’s camera for video games that use blocks, letter tiles and other tangible objects.
A third game, for Windows phones and tablets, lets players move through a fantasy overlay on the real-world map — while riding in the car.
These games solve an obvious problem for me: I love to see my kids getting games' benefits — problem-solving, teamwork, familiarity with digital UI. But I admit I’m a little queasy watching consumer electronics absorb their entire attention.
Tablets, phones and laptops are personal devices. For me, that means it’s hard to get away with reading The Wall Street Journal on a tablet at the breakfast table. Unfolding the print edition never seemed rude. Somehow, the presence of a physical object at least opens the door to interaction — in a way that reading on a phone or a tablet closes it.
Real-world play: How it works.
Osmo’s iPad stand and a clip-on mirror let the iPad capture and interface with a 3-D environment. Tangible’s first game, "Tangram" (reviewed here by GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers and her daughter), shows players shapes and has them construct the shapes out of blocks. A second game, "Words," comes with letter tiles and works like Pictionary. A third game, "Newton," has players change the direction of falling Pachinko balls with designs drawn on paper. Backers of Tangible’s Kickstarter will get the first shipments of Osmo in August, according to the review.
Boston-born "Tiggly" is a set of block shapes that comes with a set of iPad apps. You can buy it in 300 Apple Stores, Nordstrom, Learning Express and Boston children's retailer Magic Beans, Boston Business Journal's David Harris writes. Founded in Boston by Harvard graduates, the company moved to New York after an unsuccessful Kickstarter. Its game launched in 2013 and "Tiggly" now has 10 employees.
"Dragons Adventure: World Explorer" is a third real-world game for kids. This one uses city blocks, not plastic blocks. It's a car-trip game based on the "How to Train Your Dragon" film series and published by DreamWorks in a partnership with Microsoft. "Dragons Adventure" uses location data to fly a digital dragon in an area around the moving vehicle, represented on a fantasy landscape laid over the real-world map. The game brings in data from The Weather Channel to match in-game conditions to the current conditions at the car's location.
Next up: Real-world tablet games for adults? Sure. It's not hard to imagine a physical-digital building game that takes these children's games to a higher level of complexity. There's already a wave of games that simulate the "real" world: To wit, they're mundane. "Papers, Please," a puzzle game by Lucas Pope, is a fascinating example of the budding genre. You play a fatigued Eastern Bloc border official, confronted by a parade of would-be immigrants.
I could see connecting a concept like that to the mobile device for actual play in the real world. Yeah, just to show these four-year-old gamers what "real" really is.
