The University Of Sunderland’s senior lecturer in video and new media Mike Pinchin.
In the bowels of the University of Sunderland’s Media Centre, tucked behind banks of screens and empty boxes of kit, sits Mike Pinchin, senior lecturer in video and new media. He’s a man with a passion – scratch that – an obsession with new tech and the power of games to enhance learning and reconnect disenfranchised people.
His experimental approach to the new toys he uses to educate students and members of the community is driven by one of the keystone qualities of successful game development – a planet-sized imagination.
Pinchin’s latest initiative has seen him hook up an Oculus Rift to a static bicycle via a £20 arduino circuit board. “It’s got loads of pins to connect it with electronic components,” he explains. “I put a magnet on the bike wheel connected to the board and it acts like an ‘up’ input so when you pedal it pushes forward.” Pinchin further enhanced his makeshift arcade experience with a mechanism for applying the bike’s brakes on inclines to mimic the effects of pedaling uphill. “And you can do all sorts of cool things with temparature sensors,” he adds.
Pinchin’s first obsession was with music technology. He worked as a sound engineer in the 1980s and 1990s. “It was not easy to pay the bills, but at the time the internet was just taking off so I spent a lot of time doing websites,” he recalls. “I was using Macromedia’s Director back in the day, which was very primitive compared to the tools now. The day I started using Unity I have not used my music equipment since, a new obsession took over.”
Soon Pinchin was creating 3D environments and mini games, but his brainwave in terms of connecting with communities came as a result of the limitations of early iOS hardware. He was forced to create very foggy environments to counter limited draw distances on his games. And that reminded him of an infamous ditty from the north east of England, Fog On The Tyne, referring to nearby Newcastle’s river.
Pinchin’s 3D model of Newcastle’s famous river.
“I had created a 3D module of Newcastle for Second Life, so I used this as an a starting point to introduce people who have no IT/3D skills to game mechanics. I have done techhie stuff before with community groups, but showing 13- or 14-year-olds some code that turned a background colour red just didn’t speak to them. It suddenly twigged that teaching people through game engines is fun, but spreadsheets and databases are dull.”
The first project he did using the mechanics of play and his 3D environment was with a group of young dads. It took place after gunman Raoul Moat had killed a man and shot a police officer at pointblank range before taking his own life when cornered by police.
“The dads had dropped out of school in their teens and came from a challenged estate. We were in a community centre with barbed wire fences and they did a firstperson shooter. However a student decided to use samples of Raoul Moat from wav files on their phone.”
At least, thought Pinchin, he had connected with the young men, even if he had to modify their output in the interests of taste. He continues to use Unity and game mechanics to educate students from a range of disciplines in the community and at the University of Sunderland. And Pinchin is now seeing plenty of downloads of his own games.
“Probably my favourite project would be the work I have done around the Luder (made famous in the movie Get Carter) car park in Gateshead. It’s a very iconic structure which is great from a 3D modelling perspective, but the brutalist style of architecture makes a great game level. As the carpark was demolished in 2010, it seems strange not to see it on the Newcastle skyline. So it always bring a smile to my face that it lives on in games created by kids that grew up in the shadow of this concrete goliath.”
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