As we continue to push forward into a digital world, the role of traditional forms of media are constantly changing. E-books are challenging the printed word, while board games are being reimagined on electronic platforms like the iPad. But few creators have taken as imaginative an approach to these ideas as Les Editions Volumiques. The French publishing house has developed numerous interesting creations, ranging from a paper video game to a board game which uses your phone as the playing piece.

Ars spoke with Bertrand Duplat and Etienne Mineur, the duo behind Les Editions Volumiques, to learn a little bit more about what they're attempting to do.

They describe their company as "a publishing house focusing on the paper book as a new computer platform." Prior to forming Les Editions, Duplat and Mineur did everything from designing games and websites to creating game development tools. Eventually, the two decided to see what would happen if they merged some of their passions together. "We both loved books and video games and we wanted to reconcile the two!" the pair told Ars via e-mail.

The result was an actual video game made out of paper.

"Basically our vision to reconcile books and video games—the digital media and the tangible media—was to create what we call a 'Paper Video Game,'" they explained. "Bringing together the gameplay of video games and the tangibility of paper books. We did that in a very literal way in both Duckette and The Book That Turns Its Own Pages. In Duckette you actually have a video game within a regular paper printed page—printed with special inks of course—involving a little duck looking for an exit out of the page.

"And in TBTTIOP, the gameplay is not within one single page, but across all pages. A chip in the book runs a storytelling 'engine' and uses your choices as a reader to compute for you at which page you should get, and then the book actually turns its own pages to get you there."

From that came several other unique experiments, including a book that will turn black 20 minutes after being opened and a book titled Kernel Panic, which consists of screen captures from computer crashes. Some will be commercially available, while others are simply prototypes. But in addition to these strange and creative books, Les Editions is also working on a pair of board games—dubbed (i)Pawn and (i)Pirates—that utilize the iPhone in unique ways.

"Our real world object+ iPhone/iPad board games are an extension of our concept of a 'Paper Video Game,'" Duplat and Mineur told Ars. "The board on normal board games is often paper-based, actually. So we kept the board—initially a map for the game (i)Pirates—and we used the iPhone as the pawn, displaying on its screen both the player ship and the action that goes on. Then we inverted it—the iPhone/iPad screen became a board and now the pawns became tangible: physical pawns in the physical world. That's (i)Pawn."

For (i)Pawn, the team developed a mechanism that allows the iPhone's touchscreen to recognize the playing pieces individually, and the game then uses that information to compute the gameplay. They wouldn't reveal the specifics of how that mechanism works. (i)Pirates, meanwhile, utilizes the iPhone's accelerometer to determine where the phone is on the board. According to Les Editions' website, (i)Pirates will be available starting in October, while (i)Pawn will launch in November. And both games will be available in English. Players will need to purchase both the physical playing pieces and the digital copies of the actual games.

Clearly Duplat and Mineur have some very unique and exciting ideas for what the future of books and board games might look like and how they will utilize new technologies. What we've seen so far appears to be just the beginning.

"Upcoming books, and especially the visual ones, have to visually differentiate from the screen, and display spectacular tangible properties—smart pop-ups, animated images, new technological inks and printing techniques, etc.—then they have to play on qualities that are usually more associated with the digital such as interactivity and soon connectivity"