The Digital Library Project

After DGL, the group focused on widening the class of games that could be prototyped, or archived. This continued interest was strengthened by our one of our Associate Deans here at Rice, Tony Elam. He has an impressive collection of board games (on the order of 5000) that he wishes to digitize. He could go to outside companies to digitize these games, however, the average company claimed that it could digitize a board game in 3 to 4 days. With this throughput, it would take half a century to digitize his complete collection.

So, the following question was posed to this group: How can these games be digitized in a reasonable amount of time? The Digital Library Project was the first cut a response. Built on similar technology as DGL, DLP allows users to describe board games in a compact fashion. Unlike DGL, we used Java in order to describe the games in order to have a more seamless web presence.

One future feature of DLP will be our interactive development environment for board games. This IDE is inspired by Visual Studio and Photoshop. The amount of code that individuals would need to type in order to describe a game should be minimized with this editor.

Below are links to Java applets which will allow you to play some games that we have prototyped. You can play with other human players or against AI opponents.

Warning: Only play uses Java applets which may take some time to load. Please be patient. Both online play and the editor require Java 1.6.01.

Overview of Motivation and Goals

Play Online!

DLP Visual Editor