Creating a 21st Century Video Game

Reported November 2007

FAIRFAX, Va. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Each year brings the latest and greatest in video game technology. Now, one college student re-invents a version of a classic game that’s a huge hit!

As a kid, Stephen Taylor didn’t just want to play video games … he wanted to invent them too.

“I’ve always dreamed of growing up and being this game developer,” said Taylor, who is a senior at George Mason University.

Now, his dream is reality. Bored during a college break, he developed a video game called plasma paddles -- it’s a psychedelic twist on the classic game of Pong.

“Imagine a game of pong inside of a lava lamp,” Taylor explained.

The idea of the game is the same as the original -- to get a ball past your opponent’s paddles. But the game "flowed" in a whole new direction when Taylor applied what he was learning in his fluid dynamics class.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of having fluid inside of a game,” Taylor said.

Of course, it’s not real liquid. Steve used a computer-simulating program to create the game. A click of the right-mouse button creates a vacuum that sucks the ball in. The left mouse button shoots out a jet stream of "trippy liquid" that pushes the ball for extra speed -- giving new life to an old game.

“If you’ve got this complex fluid running in the background, I figured it would be easier just to have a simple game concept around that,” Taylor said.

The game became a smash hit overnight with internet downloads slowing the school’s server to a crawl, and putting the 21st century game on the map.

“Plasma paddles is really fun for the modern person, for someone my age,” Sean Gagnon, a George Mason University student told Ivanhoe.

And Taylor’s dream of designing a video game came true.

The American Association of Physics Teachers contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Stephen Taylor
George Mason University
Address
City, ST

staylor5@gmu.edu

American Association of Physics Teachers
College Park, MD
(301) 209-3311
http://www.aapt.org

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