Olli Järviniemi

Games from another culture

Today I got my hands on an electronic scale accurate to the gram, so my friends and I played some games made possible by modern technology.

The first was mass estimation. Examine an object, make an estimate, weigh it, repeat with $12$ different objects. I was surprisingly bad. The worst errors:

In general I also underestimated how much things weigh: 9 out of 12 masses were higher than my median estimate.

For the second game, we played the game from 47 minutes of interdimensional cable TV (which everyone has of course seen, right), where at the 15-minute mark there’s a clip of the halving game. In the halving game, contestants are given an object and the contestant’s task is to divide it with a knife into two parts of as equal mass as possible.

We played this. As competition objects we chose foodstuffs of as varied shapes as possible: bagels, pears, oddly shaped sweet potatoes, avocados, and ice cream cones. For the final round we chose funnel cakes, which, as expected, exploded in some people’s hands while cutting.

Fun to try once, but I understand why this hasn’t become a hit in our dimension.

The hundred’s hundred is a sport where the competitor’s goal is to move a 100-kilogram load a distance of 100 meters as fast as possible. It’s easy to play on a beach by shoveling sand into trash bags. Send a message if you’re coming.

Yesterday I played the juggle game, a sort of 1v1 volleyball, but instead of hitting you throw the ball while juggling two others.

There were good moments where, by jumping and reaching with my hand stretched straight, I just barely caught the ball, kept all the balls under control, and then successfully returned it to my opponent. Just like a tennis pro nailing a smash — I’ve never felt so athletic.

It has probably taken a dozen-plus hours of play to reach my current skill level, but as a sport it’s considerably easier and friendlier than, say, tennis. I take this as a positive sign that it’s possible to develop good New Sports.

In the Schelling game, the players’ goal is to choose, without communicating, the same option from a given set of options.

Welcome to the Schelling game. The first rule of the Schelling game is: you do not talk about the Schelling game. The second rule of the Schelling game is: you DO NOT talk about the Schelling game! Third rule of the Schelling game: if someone yells anything, makes faces, or taps to communicate, the game is over. Fourth rule: at least two guys to a game. Fifth rule: one game at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the games are bare mind. No phones, no computers, no internet. Seventh rule: games will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: regardless if this is your first time at Schelling games, you have to play.

It’s a common tradition that at Easter chocolate eggs are hidden around the house or outside for the children.

That’s a fun game. We developed the following version of it.

We alternate between seeker and hider. Suppose I’m the hider. First I write down for myself some time-range I’m trying to hit. In practice good time-ranges were 30s–3min and 1min–5min.

Then I try to hide the chocolate egg in a spot where I expect it to take that long for seeker to find it. Having hidden the egg, I give a probability that the search time really falls in that range. After that the seeker gets to come in and look for the chocolate egg.

This nicely incentivizes finding hiding spots of just the right level. Of course we otherwise tried to come up with creative and fun hiding spots.

We played a few rounds and it was fun. The illusion of transparency hit at first, when I thought the spots were easier than they were. Then while searching you could keep up a couple of minutes of good intensity, frantically trying to go through (at least in your head) all the good hiding spots.

I’d like to play a game where I have to dodge balls shot at me. The idea would be that somewhere there’s a physical area, in which a dozen air cannons are set up in a semicircle, and the player is in the middle to be shot at by the cannons. The cannons would be connected to a computer so their firing time, and also their direction and firing speed, could be controlled. A camera could track where the player moves and aim the cannons toward them. With software you could adjust the difficulty level and other parameters.

The problem is just that such cannons aren’t exactly free — from a quick query to language models, the price could easily be four figures per cannon. I don’t really have ten grand to throw at this. (But maybe paintball guns are already more mass-produced and cheaper? Though the feeling weakens if meaty dodgeballs are replaced with paintballs.) Then you have to wrestle with the real-world machines for a while to get the system working.

I figured it’d be easier to have AR for simulating dodgeballs flying toward you. Then you just reserve plenty of space (e.g. outside on a lawn), with some cushioning mats so you can leap around. Sadly I didn’t find anything for this to play in AR, nor do I really know the technology. I’d be curious to know how hard implementing something like that would be.