Author: by Beth A.

FuturePlay 2006, a conference for industry employees and academia on the future of games, has announced its 2006 competition winners. The conference took place October 10-12, 2006 in London, Ontario. The FuturePlay Game Exhibition and Competition invited academic, independent, experimental, and student developers to gain recognition for their game-related work in a peer-reviewed setting. Games were exhibited with a poster outlining the unique and innovative aspects of the game including any relevant research related to its design or development. The game competition took place at the conference itself. During exhibition times, conference attendees participated through a People's Choice Award, and a panel of judges rated the games in each category. Hapticast, a 3D first-person shooter with wizards and haptically enabled wands by Sheldon Andrews and Javier Mora, took the runner up prize for Future Game Technology and Design. The category was won by Flux, credited to Algoma U’s "Dare To Be Digital" team: Gavon Acton, Mike Biocchi, Darren Schnare, Nathan Inch, and Spencer Congdon. Flux is a game in which players charge and build a network of power nodes purely though the use of intuitive clickless gestures. As power increases in the network, so does the threat of the fluid-like energy entity dispersing through the network. Runner up in the Future Game Impacts and Applications category, for games that are built for learning, social change, and health purposes, was taken by Lori Shyba's Pipeline Pinball Energy Thrill Ride Game, while David G. Brown's Super Slalom Alpine Racing, a 3-dimensional alpine ski racing game with realistic sounds, took the top category prize. Future Game Talent, meant primarily for individuals who have built an original, entertainment game title, had tied runners up: Jen Defore, Jay Shurtliff, Yun Liu, Brian Winn for Snow Day, and Boris Ye for Pandora. Snow Day is a casual, web-based arcade game in which a huge snowstorm has struck the city, with the player taking the role of the city's sole snowplow driver to prevent a "snow day." Pandora is a storyline driven first-person shooter with multiple weapon options and environments. The top Future Game Talent winners were the team from the University of Denver with their migrant farm worker-themed game Squeezed. In the People's Choice Award category, Algoma U’s "Dare To Be Digital" team was again rewarded for their game Flux.