Adventures in Electrostatic

So last week I created most masculine of Tetris mods… ArmWrestleTetris, and it was a hit; but unfortunately it could not take one. Because it was built in my typical, lets see what we can build from the junk shelf and scrap wood, way, it could not stand up to the pure testosterone of two people battling over blocks. So this week I decided to redesign and bulk up the interface!

ArmwrestlingTetris, and MDA perspective:

At first AWT had a very different mechanic: two players… but one on the side of the computer… so it ended up being user vs. the computer and a arm wrestler. With this ‘APLA’ version, a player would be battling simply a more difficult Tetris game. The mechanic would be similar to the original Tetris, but with some resistance. I imagine the dynamic would involve some grunting and straining, but soon the “why am I playig this?” question would surface and the player would quit. Even though they were battling a computer and person… the person may as well have been a robot… just doing what they are told. 

So after that train of thought I decided to make the game full-duplex. Two people acting as people and really competing against each other. Obviously the mechanic had to change a little, but not in the actual rules… they were the same… it was only the constraints that I muddled with: By adding a mechanism that the two players had to hold hands (in the arm wrestling position), joined in their movements, they now were semi dependent on each other. This dependency adds a whole new dimention to the dynamic of the game; now there is more frustration and trickery… fake-outs and struggle. The players have to shift their thinking back and forth between what they are doing and what their opponent is doing… it is very hard. All of this shifting adds confusing… and thus lots of laughing and sometimes anger. The game had this neat master-slave relationship that changes all the time, or doesn’t if the players are oddly matched. Overall, the full duplex version is way more fun and exciting… not as predictable… way  better than normal Tetris and arm wrestling by themselves.

ArmwrestlingTetris as steroids:

Even the pale, “indoor,” kids as ITP can transform into bragging, muscle obsessed, alpha males with a little “behavior modification” by our friend the ArmwrestlingTetris game. I really was surprised to see sweat, yelling, and a broken project after demoing the game for the first time. ITP is normally so low-key; people are courteous and all around gentile to projects… but once a little competition and muscle was introduced all bets were off. I have to say though, that I liked it… people were really involved… like they had something on the line; maybe they did, like pride? I think that must be it… I know for myself it doesn’t feel good to loose a game, especially in front of a bunch of people, and for some reason it stings worse when there is strength involved. 

The extra involvement in ArmwrestlingTetris may also be the result of the the general “bodiness” of the game; in my other projects where touching or squeezing are main elements, I get the same sense of participation from them, not as strong as in the arm wrestling… but similar. I sometimes imagine that I am reaching a subconscious realm in the brain of the user that most electronic devises don’t get to… but I have no idea it that is true. I DO however know that the objects in our lives are slowly degrading our connection to our bodies… and we need to fix that. We are still the primal animals we were thousands of years ago and sometimes we just need to wrestle!