I just got back from the conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (the E in TEI apparently exists in a probabilistic state between “embedded” and “embodied”). I’ve always thought this conference had a clear relevance to people interested in innovative game controllers, but this year they had a session entirely around Games and Narrative. I also did a “Bizarro Game Controllers” workshop with another former UCI student, Eric Kabisch. That will go up soon, since I still have some video to deal with from that.

A conference on Tangibles will approach games largely from the angle of doing interesting things with game controllers, and that’s exactly what we saw in three out of four papers. Karen and Josh Tanenbaum’s paper was the last in the session (and one of the best at the conference) and actually dealt elegantly with both tangible objects and narrative, where the two are entirely integral to one another.

Keep reading to get the particulars on: Digital Games for Physical Therapy, Mixed Reality Robot Gaming, an Embodied Puppet Interface, and the interactive narrative of the Reading Glove.