Space Fortress is a video game with a long and distinguished history in cognitive science research, and a summary of that history is necessary, as the interface, screen layout, and scoring have changed considerably over the years. Space Fortress, based off of a 1980 vector-based arcade game by Cinematronics called Star Castle, was developed by Mané and Donchin (1989) in the mid-1980’s as part of a large DARPA project to study different training methods on a task that required operating under heavy cognitive load. The goals of creating the game was to develop a task that was difficult (requiring many hours to become expert) and engaging enough that players would be motivated to continue practicing after many hours of play. The game was then distributed to an international consortium of researchers, each tasked with developing their own “learning strateg” (Donchin, 1989) to hasten players’ mastery of the game. Any method used outside of letting the players practice the game on their own was considered a learning strategy.
- Python 2.6 or 2.7
- pygame
- pyopengl
- pyopengl-accelerate
- pygl2d
- twisted
- PIL
Note: On OSX 10.8, you must update your SDL library to version 1.2.15.
Run the game: :
python src/spacefortress5.pyRun the config editor: :
python src/configeditor.py