The Strange Arcade at IndieCade East 2016 lives up to its name. Nestled on the top floor of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens the exhibit exists to playfully challenge the notion of what video games should be. The focus this year is on titles that implement unusual controls. Instead of your typical mouse and keyboard or gamepad, the titles on display in the Strange Arcade are non-traditional at best.
“ As we start to examine different ways to control and interface with computers that lets us tell different kinds of stories,” said Sam Roberts, Festival Director at IndieCade and one of the curators behind the Strange Arcade exhibit at IndieCade East 2016.
The stories being told at this year’s festival include many challenging tactile surprises. I personally reveled in Hello, Operator , a game built into an old Bell Telephone switchboard that has players swapping phone calls in and out old school style. The voices on the other end of the line are rather blase, but it’s easy to see how the game could be blown out with over-the-top voice acting and eavesdropping driven narrative.
For now, it's just a frenzied good time as you frantically jam plugs into wires and flip switches off and on. And before you think a game like this is commercially impractical, Roberts would remind you that there is plenty of sales appeal to non-conventional control schemes.
“If you actually just look at the commercial space, some of this stuff is happening. Like, Rock Band is a game that works because they have this whole special controller. Skylanders was huge,” he said.
“This space is ripe. I think the kind of design exploration you're seeing at Strange Arcade is going to start to leak into the commercial sector. And there's going to be interesting stuff.”
Ziff , a Strange Arcade participant featuring a toy robot with interchangeable legs, certainly has the feel of a commercial success. Players switch Ziff’s legs around to perform different tasks on screen. Legs on the bottom to walk, legs on the head act like wings for flying and legs on the back to swim and dive. It’s a toy, really, and playing with a toy is one of the easiest things imaginable.
The spirit of the event isn’t to find the next hot toy, though. It’s about developers thinking of how to play games in new ways or with new objects. TRIPAD , a three way pong-style game where players have to trap a bouncing ball to score points, is played out on three interlocked Novation LaunchPad Minis. LaunchPad Minis are normally used by DJs for audio engineering, but Alexander Krasij gamified them to create an entirely different purpose for the equipment. And Roberts believes the kind of thinking that causes game developers to create non-traditional games can attract non-traditional gamers.
“As we start to examine different ways to control and interface with computers that lets us tell different kinds of stories. Make games that are different kinds of things. And it makes games approachable in a lot of ways,” he said. “Our mission is very much about highlighting innovation and different kinds of stuff ... there's tons of people out there who would play games. We want to help reach those people. This stuff is approachable and you can dive right in and have a different experience.”
Perhaps no other game at Strange Arcade typifies this approachable innovativeness more than Line Wobbler . Line Wobbler looks like something you might find on a boardwalk midway or summer carnival. A luminescent string of LED lights runs off a table and up to the ceiling. Players control a small green speck of light by using an oversized spring, kind of like a joystick. They move the dot up and down to try and get to the top of the string but have to wobble the controller to move the green dot past different colored lights that block it's path to the top.
With increasingly complex patterns and speeds coupled with laser beam sound effects, Line Wobbler is a spectacle. It attracts a near constant crowd at the exhibit, but attendees needn’t be intimidated. It goes from strange-looking contraption to easiest-game-to-understand in just a few seconds, all thanks to the intuitive controls. And the crowd of happy gamers it attracts is indicative of what Roberts thinks is a distinct advantage for games that require non-traditional controls.
“Everything now is downloadable. Things are immediate. I, like every human being I know, have like 127 Steam games I've purchased and never got around to playing,” he said. “Whereas if you have the thing sitting in your house, or it's at an event or in a real world space, there's this extra level of immediacy that makes you want to play it. ”
The Strange Arcade is full of games you’d want to play and, unlike your Steam library, it won’t be around forever. The exhibit will be at IndieCade East 2016 at MoMI until Sunday, May 1.
