Das renommierte Wissenschaftsmuseum in London (Wikipedia: Science Museum) widmet sich der Entwicklung von Forschung und Technik und versucht, diese Gebiete anschaulich darzustellen. Das Physik-Rätselspiel Launchball ist so eine animierte Darstellung, wurde als kostenlose Flash-Version über zwei Millionen mal gespielt, jetzt samt Level-Editor für das iPhone und den iPod touch bereitgestellt und vom Games-Portal Touch Arcade für gut befunden. Dabei werden auch die Englischkenntnisse auf spielerische Weise aufgefrischt. App Store Link, 0,79 €. Goal!

A legitimate way to waste time, and another great physics puzzle, given to us here by the Science Museum

As it’s a holiday weekend, I’m going to do two Friday Fun posts this week; one today (a game) and one tomorrow (more of an interactive media piece

Today’s app is actually produced by the Science Museum and it’s called: launchball

launchball is essentially a ‘physics’ game. By positioning a series of blocks strategically within a room you have to configure the room so that a ball dropped into it bounces its way to the room exit. The blocks represent various things – such as springs, or fans, for instance – which act on the ball as you might expect. The room also models gravity, of course…

How is the difficulty managed across levels? To what extent are the levels designed so that the player is taught “how to play the game” by actually playing the game?

As well as playing the prepopulated levels (and there are 30 of them!) there’s also a studio where you can create your own levels.

Read more about launchball here: launchball.

Launchball was designed with education in mind, so there’s also a Teachers’ Guide to Launchball available… It also links to a particular useful Guide to the Launchball blocks.

If you do manage to create a level or two, why not write a blog post about them with a screenshot or two, or maybe even comment back here with a link so we can all have go?

Using the level designer, could you design a five to ten level game that starts from scratch (i.e. that assumes the player knows nothing about the game) and that uses the early levels to teach the player how to use 3 or 4 sorts of block , before presenting them with 3 or four increasingly difficult levels that require the particularly cunning use of those blocks?

Yesterday there was a flurry of excitement on Twitter (a “flutter of tweets”?) as the Science Museum’s Launchball was named SXSW “Best of Show“. This is an awesome achievement. SXSW is a hugely well regarded conference and for a museum to win not only the Games section but the coveted BOS as well is just enormous news.

I was still at the Science Museum as Head of Web for the first two thirds of the Launchball project, a fact of which I’m incredibly proud. As it happens, I got to do the fun bit without any of the hard work which always takes up the final push for the summit of any digital project…

Launchball is by pretty much any standards an enormous success. It has received over 1.5 million page views in the first six months of life. After I posted it to Digg it took on its own virality, taking the Science Museum web server down because of the immense levels of traffic. It has a following which you can see in the fact that users feel enthusiatic enough about it to create entire sites dedicated to possible solutions. You can see by the comments on this site, for example, how communities started to evolve around the game.

The success of Launchball is, in retrospect, fairly easy to ascribe. I thought it might be interesting to focus on the elements that I feel made up this success, given my (two-thirds) complete knowledge of the way that the project was driven. Fundamentally, these elements centred around freedom in the way the project was allowed to run, flexibility and adaptability of content and testing teams, creativity of the people involved and a certain element of luck that all the elements came together in the right order and at the right time.

We (the web team) pushed for – and were given – a huge amount of scope in helping to define the creative concept behind the game. This is relatively unusual in my experience – often the web team is seen as a service mechanism to deliver content by curators, education staff or other content teams. In this instance, I pushed very hard for recognition that – given the people involved – the web team creative input was absolutely key to delivering a successful experience for Launchpad Online.

Way back at the beginning of the project – looong before any creative agencies were involved – we sat down in a small group knowing only the budget and timescale, and braindumped what we thought we should aim to do. I’d had a tiny fledgling idea about a physics engine environment which encouraged users to play and “learn by stealth”. I’m a Heath Robinson fan (who isn’t?) and an inventor at heart, and the idea of having an environment in which you could play around with a bunch of gadgets, solve some fun problems and maybe learn something too was hugely compelling.

We started by running a brainstorm with the content team, and then honed this down with just the web team. We chose to have a defined output of 3 or 4 concepts. My brainstorms always begin with this: “We have infinite budget, infinite time. Now what do we want to do?”. I see little point in being constraining when what you’re trying to do is capture everything…

Out of this we came out with 4 key concepts – “Build it and share it”, “Ask an Explainer”, “Simulation”, “Real Experiments”. Each had social elements, interactivity, and were designed to be built around a central Flash-based interactive.

We then presented these concepts to the various stakeholders – the content teams, sponsors and education experts and used their feedback to focus and distill the final vision for the interactive and site. In the end we took the first concept but took popular elements from the others. The end result was the vision of a physics engine environment. We used mindmap software and Powerpoint to develop wireframes so we could convey our ideas to the stakeholders. Here’s a segment of one of the key documents:

You’ll notice that the whole concept of a “stage” upon which various gadgets are moved is already pretty well established – we still hadn’t taken on a creative or technical agency, wanting instead to be very sure we had a strong vision and brief to take to them at the right time.

One of the key things that we wanted to get right all the way through the process was to avoid a very obvious temptation: to try and re-create the Launchpad exhibits in a virtual medium. This would have been terribly easy, and completely wrong: Launchpad itself is a very physical experience, deliberately avoiding virtuality on-gallery. Instead, we wanted an environment which spoke to the essence of Launchpad: experimentation, fun, a strong element of self-guided learning, but without aping the physicality of the exhibits.

Once we had sign-off of the concept, we then went through the briefing and pitching process, choosing the wonderful Preloaded as the design agency. Behind the scenes, we used Eduserv (more specifically, Stephen Pope, one of the best web developers I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with…) to hook in the Sitecore CMS to store levels and user preferences. Outside, of course, was a framework of project management, run by “I’m just good at nagging” Jane Audas…

Preloaded did an astonishing job with the concept, taking it from paper-based design and really running with it to make it something with enormous class and style. The addition of ambient washes of music came from nowhere, for example, and really add hugely to the experience.

Round about this time I left the museum, so missed out on – as I say – the inevitable last minute tweaks, irritations, budget issues and timescales that always lurk around any project. From a distance, it all looked smooth, and maybe that’s all that counts

Either which way, I’d just like to say a massive well done to everyone involved. I think Launchball really sets the bar (really, really high…) for not just museum interactive exhibits but for online gameplay as a whole. It’s just absolutely great that the world seems to have recognised this as well.

Titre : Launchball
Adresse: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/
Développeur : Preloaded
Annonceur: Science museum
Année de publication: Décembre 2007
Jeux concours: non
Collecte d’informations: non

Pour les joueurs
Scientifique à mes heures perdues, je ne rechigne jamais longtemps à résoudre quelques énigmes. Mais là où je craignais qu’un test sur cet advergame vire à la prise de tête, je me suis retrouvé en face d’un jeu aux niveaux agréables à jouer. Véritables laboratoires, ces derniers, au nombre de 16, permettent d’user d’aimants, ventilateurs et autres étrangetés. Les amateurs de jeux de réflexion adoreront observer, puis tester les différentes possibilités, lesquelles sont quasiment infinies. Non content de ce qu’il propose, cet advergame rajoute un mode édition permettant d’inventer et de partager ses créations. Un must dans son genre!

Graphismes: 3/5
Jouabilité: 3/5
Durée de vie: 5/5
Fun: 3/5

Pour les marketeurs
Prix d’Or des Eurobest 2007 dans la catérgorie interactive, ce jeu s’inscrit dans la nouvelle stratégie du Science Museum, basé en Angleterre. Ce dernier, ouvert en 1857, s’engage depuis 2007 à sensibiliser les jeunes aux sciences. La raison d’être de cet advergame est donc d’encourager le jeune public à apprendre en testant soi-même certaines lois de la physique. Le concept est d’ailleurs repris au fameux musée où il sert de laboratoire virtuel aux futurs Einstein (et aux autres).

Puissance : 3/5
Affinité : 5/5
Temps d’exposition : 4/5
Image de marque : 5/5

Note Globale Advergame :

A vous de jouer : Saurez-vous faire preuve de déduction dans ces casse-têtes?

This is a nice diversion for anyone who likes easy-ish, flash games.