Virtually limitless: video games emulate the world at many scales (Image: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

JUST what do nanotechnology and video games have in common?

The answer is not immediately obvious. The first involves the precision control of matter at an atomic level: the construction of an infinitesimal car, or a microscopic computer, for example. The second involves building fictional, weightless worlds on a screen.

The first could revolutionise healthcare, with the creation of nanoscale medical submarines that tour the body fixing problems. Or it might forever change manufacturing by allowing us to produce, replicate and distribute at a molecular level any substance known to humanity. The second allows us to shoot monsters in the face.

Nevertheless, Colin Milburn, who studies connections between science, literature and media technologies at the University of California at Davis, argues that the two fields are closely related. They are, at heart, both playful, whose proponents enjoy painting visions of future worlds through the arrangement of either atoms or pixels. Indeed, the act of imagining atom-by-atom assembly has already become, in toys like LEGO and Minecraft, child’s play.

Games and nanotechnology share an interest in playful, world-changing innovation. “Surely there is some ludic impulse in the tendency to make the most elementary acts of atomic manipulation into signs of revolution,” Milburn writes.

“Both games and nanotechnology share an interest in playful, world-changing innovation”

But the link is more than merely abstract. All video games deal in the language of scientific visualisation and will therefore be essential tools for exploring a future in which physical matter is as easily manipulated as pixels on a screen. Soon, designing molecular systems will be like programming computers. When matter is rendered digital, “there will no longer be a distinction between an atom and a bit, organism and a program, real life and video game”.

Indeed, nanoscientists already interact with the nanoscale world as if they were playing a video game. And influence flows in the opposite direction, too. Titles such as Crysis, Deus Ex, PlanetSide and the Metal Gear Solid saga turn speculative nanoscience and military engineering into recreational experiences.

In revealing their visions of what a soldier from the future might be like, they simultaneously draw upon current technologies, and conjure up a vision of the worlds those technologies might usher in.

Mondo Nano is a wide-ranging, occasionally unfocused book. It offers a clear demonstration of how the methods, dispositions and goals of nanotechnology often converge with video game development and culture.

It works best as a broad manifesto for the role that games should have in all areas of scientific ambition. “Science is most successful when it abandons method and opens itself to play,” is Milburn’s surprising assertion. “Games motivated by childish curiosity have long informed cultural narratives about science and its practitioners.”

For Milburn, video games are an essential tool in the quest to further human knowledge. But they also help us navigate the “bewildering complexity of technoculture in a time of rapid globalisation”. Today it is no longer possible to “imagine sufficient mastery of anything”.

Knowing enough to have fun may replace the old standard of formal expertise. Milburn argues convincingly that video games let us try out different visions of the future, and better understand the present, from the nanoscale up.

This article appeared in print under the headline “All the world’s a game”

For a week in chilly March, a cavernous hall at south-east London’s became a blacked-out theatrical art installation for a performance delivered in total darkness. Flatland is the latest work from , the UK’s only professional performing arts company of visually impaired artists. It’s an ambitious production that combines the frisson of immersive theatre with haptic technology. Its aim is straightforward. There is, according to , artistic director at Extant, a disproportionate focus on the visual arts in public exhibits. This production hopes to redress the balance. Flatland (which is still in its proof-of-concept phase; the final production won’t launch till 2018) is experienced only through sound, movement and touch.

The production – in collaboration with Janet van der Linden of the Open University and Ad Spiers from Yale University – has its origin in an 1884 satirical novella written by the English schoolmaster . Abbott’s Flatland tells the story of a two-dimensional world populated by two-dimensional characters. Social class in this world is determined by shape, a hierarchy disturbed when the community is visited by a sphere from a three-dimensional “Spaceland”. In Extant’s version, an exile from Flatland briefs the audience before sending them as spies to his totally dark homeland: a two dimensional world of sorts.

Robbed of sight, the only way to navigate the environment is by placing your trust in a haptic cube that sits in the palm of your hand. The top half of the cube juts and swivels, to indicate whether you should walk forward or turn right and left. As you turn your body the cube rights itself, like the needle of a compass, so you always know the direction you should face, and whether you should be stationary, or move forward. At first you walk tentatively, afraid that you might strike a beam or trip over an obstacle. But in time you build trust in the technology, as it leads you through a tightening spiral corridor, or past a jutting clutch of pipes and tubes.

The haptic device is the creation of , a postdoctoral associate at , Yale University’s centre for studies in robot manipulation and biomechanics. “The device communicates with users by their sense of touch, which leaves the other senses, such as sound, open to appreciate the Flatland experience,” he says. “Most prototype haptic navigation devices, such as mobile phones or video game controllers, use vibrating motors to communicate with users. But these can get distracting and annoying when used over long periods of time. Such sensations are really suited to providing short alerts. I aimed to design an interface that would provide subtle and unobtrusive sensations to be used for guidance while also being highly intuitive.”

The installation takes four visitors at a time and in the final production, they will need to work together to leave Flatland. As you explore the space, you enter into the story. You can eavesdrop in a hospital, catch snippets of information on the streets, and sneak into the back of a cathedral as an unsettling service draws to a close. The narrative is told in a non-linear format, and the jumpsuit you pull on before entering the exhibit tracks your exact location at all times, to an accuracy of 15 centimetres, triggering audio at the appropriate moments.

The technology, impressive in itself, is there solely to serve the play. Flatland‘s power is in its levelling of the experience for blind and sighted participants, both of whom experience the exhibit in the same way. “Flatland‘s story is essentially about breaking boundaries to experience different dimensions,” says Oshodi. “In the exhibit there’s this sudden moment when you have lost your senses and the world becomes new again to you. We hope that people will take away the sense that there are other ways to experience the world around us rather than merely through sight, and come alive to the other ways in which we can interact with space.”

The prototype has a few issues; some of this week’s productions were ended prematurely due to technical difficulties. But even at this early, experimental stage, Flatland presents a strong argument for the power of sightless theatre. Likewise, in GRAB Lab’s unobtrusive cube, it demonstrates how a new generation of subtle haptic devices might be used to guide both visually impaired and sighted people around museums and heritage sites, leaving our senses open to more fully appreciate our surroundings.

THIS year’s world championship final for the hugely popular game League of Legends takes place in October at the Sangam Stadium, the cavernous venue in Seoul, South Korea, that hosted the 2002 World Cup final. The prize pot will total millions of dollars, and the tens of thousands of spectators will be joined by millions more online.

Money changes sport, even virtual sport. As prize money has grown, so too has gamers’ professionalism and dedication. One such group of five young men has just moved into a million-dollar mansion near Long Beach, California. Here, Team Dignitas will live and train together in the hope of becoming the 2014 League of Legends world champions.

The so-called gaming house is a relatively recent phenomenon, but there are hundreds of these esports boot camps around the world, where young teams live together to learn more about their chosen game and one other.

“Living together changes everything,” says Michael O’Dell, Team Dignitas’s managing director. “When my teams practise remotely over the internet I don’t know what’s going on in the background. Are they concentrating properly? Is the television on? But when you’re in a gaming house – especially when you have a manager and an analyst looking over your shoulder – nobody’s mucking around. They’re fully focused.”

Dignitas follows a strict regime. Each morning the team heads together to the gym. Gaming is inherently sedentary, but O’Dell believes that fitness has an impact on concentration levels and reaction times – crucial attributes for gaming success.

Gym over, the team spars for 2 hours with other pro gamers around the world, before breaking for lunch. Then they spend another 2 hours watching videos of rival teams, gleaning whatever intelligence they can that might give themselves an edge in competition.

After dinner, most of the team plays League of Legends well into the night. Mondays are a day of rest, although O’Dell says that they’ll often spend at least some of the day gaming “for fun”.

Team Dignitas has around 60 members and competes in nine video games. More than half the members draw a salary, derived from tournament winnings, sponsorship and advertising revenue from Twitch.TV, a website that streams live matches. Top players can earn up to $200,000 a year, although the average is around $60,000, O’Dell estimates.

With so much at stake, O’Dell has hired a life coach for the players. “They’re able to open up to him about their problems, both personal and professional,” he says. “Last week he took them to the beach and they built sandcastles together as a team-building exercise. It has to be like a family, a team, otherwise it doesn’t work at all.”

Read more: “Esports: Video games jump from couch to stadium“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Boot camps build winners”

How can you bring history to life? Forget the frayed communal headphones and audio guides at museums. With Google Glass, the wearable computer that is due for release next year, we will one day be able to go somewhere and read about local history while we stare at its real-life contours. But for some video-game developers, merely annotating the world isn’t enough. They hope to give us the power to change history with our eyes.

“Imagine visiting the site of the battle of Waterloo,” says Guillaume Campion, head of production at AMA, a French studio that is one of the first to be developing video games for Glass. “You begin by reading about what happened during the battle through the glasses. But then you have the opportunity to play a game set within that context. Maybe you can even try to change the outcome of the battle in some way.”

Video games, once confined to computers and dedicated consoles, have broken into the wild in recent years. As the size of smartphones has shrunk and their power increased, so developers have sought to take video games to new contexts. Google Glass offers the next logical platform in this trend. Since February this year, when the first developers were given the hardware, a number of game projects have emerged including Swarm, an augmented reality game that casts players as ants that must complete tasks, and , a Google Glass-based take on Battleships.

Sixth sense

AMA, which revealed a as a proof-of-concept title at the Game Developer’s Conference in Germany in August, is one of the major studios leading the Google Glass charge. Escape may be a far cry from Campion’s colourful vision of an interactive battle of Waterloo: in the game you guide a stick character around a path of dots. But the studio has been investigating ways to create games that are mapped to the real world in some way.

“Google Glass is like a sixth sense: when you wear it you’re always connected, so you can keep an eye on the real environment while using applications without your hands,” says Campion.

Despite the potential, there are significant challenges to playing games on the device, according to Det Ansinn, founder of BrickSimple, the company behind GlassBattle. “User input is a huge challenge,” he says. “The only direct physical input is a touchpad on the side of the device. Beyond that, you have an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. There’s a pupil detector that offers very limited utility.

“When you design a game for Glass, you’re limited to voice, an awkward touchpad, and those sensors. I’m certain that developers will find interesting ways to use those inputs, but it’s not conducive to traditional gaming input.”

Rethinking gameplay

As such, developers can’t directly port a smartphone game to Google Glass; they have to rethink the entire user experience. “This device is not meant to be the next console, but does present a new way of playing.” Ansinn says. “Now the challenge is to create new genres, new types of gameplay.”

AMA isn’t the only team to have envisioned a world in which video games can be seamlessly layered on top of what we see around us. One YouTube user recently of how Google Glass could be used to deliver a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter, a true multiplayer game, set in a disused quarry.

It’s a compelling vision of the future. But Campion remains unconvinced that this is the best direction for Google Glass games. “I don’t think this kind of experience will offer the killer game app for Glass,” he says. Ansinn agrees, saying the current Google Glass hardware is a limiting factor.

“Glass is not a full augmented reality experience,” Ansinn says. “The display occupies a small upper corner portion outside of your normal field of view. While Glass has ignited the imagination for full augmented reality experiences, when you wear the device, you quickly realise that it can’t deliver on some of those imagined experiences.”

Ansinn believes that future versions of Glass will soon augment the wearer’s entire field of view. “I have no doubt that is coming – this first iteration is a baby step to that dream,” he says. “But for hardcore gamers, it has a long way to go. There’s much to be said for traditional controller input.”

Even so, he remains optimistic that Glass could provide a serious platform for both developers and players in the future. “Combine display advancements with the leaps being made in mobile CPUs and GPUs, and full world-enveloping gaming experience will be here within five years. These are early days.”