When we started writing this article it turned into a dry, biographical piece: â€Developers Thomas Steinke and Duncan knew they faced a challengeâ€â€ blah blah blah.That can’t do Sabi Games’ Living Ink technology justice. Instead, let’s put it this way: If SkyNet becomes self-aware, blame Living Ink. â€Cause we've never seen a computer come this close to the kind of contextual thinking normally reserved for us hairless apes. Living Ink drives Sabi Games’ first drawing-meets-reading game, ItzaBitza. In it, children help Sketchy - a character that is up to the children's imaginations to create a story around - by creating their world. For example, in the first playset, Sketchy asks: "Can you draw a house?" And the house can look like anything the child wants - even a banana (you can see a picture of this at http://ItzaBitza.com/?p=1346). What happens if the child doesn't draw a door on their banana...um..house? Sketchy will ask for a door. Same thing with windows. Living Ink teaches the computer how to anticipate what a child will draw and use their drawings as Sketchy and the child interact with what the child draws. Because of Living Ink, each time the child plays ItzaBitza, the objects needed by Sketchy - a tree that sprouts apples, a spaceship that can be sent to another planet, and a house that can look like a banana or pumpkin or anything look different. The development team at Sabi Games has cooked up a game engine that actually interprets what children draw in context. So, if the game asks for a house, and they draw a shoe, the game assumes it’s a shoe-shaped house. Many have spent hours trying to fool the game by making the squirrel hole in the wrong part of a tree, or make the wrong part of my drawing turn into the sun. The game even interpreted our sad, sad drawing of a tree, putting apples in the right place! No joy. Living Ink matched every form of artistic insanity we could come up with. Other games are pretty clever. Crayon Physics is an amazing game, and we’ve put in our share of time making stuff fall, roll, bump and bounce in its unique 2D universe. But it doesn’t actually know that a car is a car. It just knows that the box you drew is on top of two round things, and therefore rolls. Living Ink goes one better, by actually understanding that a tree drawn with our total lack of artistic ability is nevertheless a tree, and not a toothpick that sneezed too hard! Ian watched his daughter (six years old) playing ItzaBitza. She’s a good reader but gets bored quickly and often drifts off into some alternate universe reserved for six-year-old girls and their imaginary dogs (named Truffles, in this case). This game keeps her engaged and learning in ways Ian’s never seen before. The game asks for a house. Maybe she draws a house. Maybe she draws a big round thing instead. Then it asks for a door, and she draws a door, which may or may not be door-shaped. But both my daughter and the game â€get it’ †the real goal is to understand what’s being asked of you, not to draw a house the way 99999 others have drawn it. In that way, Living Ink and ItzaBitza go where our grammar school teachers never could, by measuring kids’ success not by their ability to faithfully reproduce a typical, generic house, but instead by their ability to interpret direction and think for themselves. Duncan, Sabi’s Creative Director and Living Ink’s designer, said it best when Ian spoke with him about it: â€We experimented with versions where the child could just draw anything and leave it be, but it wasn’t compelling. Children need some goals and rules, but also an opportunity to push back at them.†This â€soft’ intelligence means any game driven by Living Ink is doubly compelling. Long after most reading games drive kids away, a Living Ink game keeps their attention. Kids can stretch the rules of the game to the utmost, using their imagination to be silly, creative or both. If they can get us to stop playing, anyway.
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