HARC - Project Summary
Project Summary
Title:Rice Digital Media Library Project
Scholar:Etienne Vouga
School:Computer Science/Mathematics
Rice University
Mentor:Dr. Joe Warren [View Presentation (Adobe PDF 220 KB)]

HARC Scholar Etienne Vouga with his Mentor, Dr. Joe Warren
HARC Scholar Etienne Vouga with his Mentor, Dr. Joe Warren
As part of the Rice Electronic Resource Center's initiative to create a digital media library, the center plans to scan a private collection of over 6,000 board games. We designed and implemented a framework which supports the archiving of not merely the images of the games, but of the rules as well. As a proof of concept we digitized thirteen games using our framework, which may be played online.

By abstracting out many of the features common across popular board game archetypes, we hope to enable students with only introductory instruction in Java to archive games quickly. For instance, round-robin ordering of turns, the movement of pawns along a linear path using dice, finding patterns on a grid board using pseudo-regular expressions, and shuffling, sorting, and displaying sets of cards are all provided by default. Simple games like Othello or Connect Four take only 100 lines of user code and about 30 minutes to implement. Our most complex demo game, "East of Thebes," in which players play the role of archeologists at the turn of the 20th century, took two days to recreate, one of which was spent scanning images.
Page Updated/Reviewed: 08/28/2006 1:53 PM