Final Project Research 1: Line Wobbler

Demonstration Video

Line wobbler is a one-dimensional dungeon crawler game created by Robert Baumgarten. It is controlled with a custom hand-made wobble control stick and the display is a long ultrabright LED strip. You move the character to start to end by pushing on the stick, and by wobbling the stick you can attack enemies and get past obstacles. Running on an arduino, the game won several awards such as the Game Design Award at IndieCade 2015.

I selected this project because it makes an interesting playable game under extremely tight constraints. Typically, 2 dimensions are needed to provide sufficient player freedom in games, but the installation was able to provide an interesting and playable experience using just one dimension. Even in the very broad field of visual arts there are very few pieces which are one dimensional, something which further makes this piece stick out on my mind.

Critiquing this work, it definitely did an excellent job at creating an interesting engaging experience with it's constraints. By making it so that you could only attack by wobbling the stick, the creator increased both the challenge and the "play" of the work. It was simply more fun and interesting to tie combat to the motions of a vibrating door stopper rather than a simple button press. In fact, the creator credited this video for the inspiration of the mechanic:

In addition to it's control scheme, the projects use of a LED strip is also notable, as it allows the installation to take on various forms, contorting to whatever layout makes the most sense for the exhibition. Something that might be improved on is the communication of the game's mechanics to the players, but given the constraints, the amount of information it gave is suitable.

In some ways, this work is comparable to another ID installation called Light Kinetics. 

In this work, the lights are affected by the physics of the object they are stationed on. As you tilt the table, the lights sway from one side to the other depending on the tilt. The 2 are similar in their ability to work with just 1 dimension and their intuitive simple control schemes. That said, I found Line Wobbler to ultimately be the more interesting piece, as it gives the player a well-defined objective, elevating it from the position of a toy to a game and providing participatory interaction. Though Light Kinematics arguably provides conversation or collaboration levels of interaction, I feel that it's interface is too simple to provide allow users to really deeply engage with each other.

Moving forward, this project has shown me that one can create fairly interesting interactive works with relatively simple visuals and control schemes. Though some of my previous works have explored this idea (see LOL SO RANDOM: http://ideate.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/lol-so-random), they still have required the user to play it through a PC, an interface device whose simplicity is strata above a simple wobbling control stick.

Sources:

http://espadaysantacruz.com/Light-kinetics

http://aipanic.com/projects/wobbler