Brice "Mangatome" Clocher

Tens of thousands of children have trained their waste sorting skills with the friendly monsters that populate the colorful world of AfA-X, in this multi-awarded and certified educational game for mobile devices. Players play at home, in school classes and in museum exhibitions where the game is regularly featured. We partner with municipalities and waste management agencies in Europe to adapt the game to their local systems. Citizens and school classes in these districts directly transfer what they learn in-game to sort trash better in everyday life. And meanwhile, waste managers get valuable insight about the sorting habits of the population.

By the late 2010s, it became well understood that action video games improve the cognitive capacities of habitual players. The reasons for this kind of impact, though, were largely unknown, and research was slowed down by external factors like the reluctance of the industry to share data with scientists. I joined the xCIT laboratory at the University of Luxembourg to help create video games, tools and infrastructure that scientists can use in large-scale online experiments to collect data and test hypotheses. Our prolific production included interactive cognitive tests piloted by web services, frameworks for data management and standardization, and a math game for children featuring a strange but friendly cat.

What started as a video marketing project for my alma mater's library, rapidly turned into a crazy idea... A year of production later: a wall is defaced, a secret book is stolen, and students are thrown in medias res in an alternate history of the campus they thought they knew. Two months of unhinged reality game with 24/7 gamemastering and improv which saw players team up to solve riddles, hack into mailboxes, answer payphones (remember those?) and collaborate to free themselves in a library-wide climactic event that basically was an escape game – several years before it even became a thing.

As part of a community of volunteer developers, I wrote a .NET engine to play Wherigo, a location-based game by the creators of Geocaching. Unlike other engines, it was designed with compatibility in mind, thanks to a full C# port of Lua 5.1 that we forked and maintained with a few tricky backports and a generous base library coverage. I also integrated the engine in a mobile app I wrote and shipped for Windows Phone, complete with a native UI and syncing of saved games to the cloud – at a time when OneDrive was still called SkyDrive... To this day, it remains to my knowledge the only mobile app capable of playing back the obscure Garmin FDL audio format, and it enabled thousands of players to enjoy their favourite outdoor game right on their (now regretted) phones.