Slight warning, this post contains talk of butt-slapping (just in case that wasn’t clear.) Earlier this year, we told you about a Kickstarter project for Makey Makey, an invention kit that allows you to turn nearly anything you want into an input device. The kit has been out in the wild for a while now, and people have been using it for games in all sorts of ways.
For example:
Playing Ecco the Dolphin by tilting a glass of water.
Here’s someone using jellybeans to play Guild Wars 2.
But by far, the most out-there idea I’ve heard about comes from developer Anna Anthropy, who has actually made somewhere where to play, you have to slap a butt. In an email exchange, she told me a bit about how she once saw a fake Kinect game called “SLAP DAT arse,” a rhythm game about slapping butts.
After seeing that, she then realised she could actually realise something like it using Makey Makey. Maybe. She had to make sure that she could use a butt as a controller.
The way the makey makey works is this: the player holds onto a gator clip plugging into the makey makey. another gator clip is attached to some object that can conduct a current. like a potato, for example. when the player, holding the first gator clip, touches the potato that’s attached to the second gator clip, she completes the current, and the game registers a keypress.
She made a prototype to test it out. It’s called RUN! YOU F**KER and she used her partner’s butt to control it. To her surprise, it worked. In fact, even the slightest contact would trigger it.
Now she’s in the process of making a more full-fledged rhythm game called SPANK OR DIE! She explains the idea:
[It’s] inspired by SKATE OR DIE 2’s title screen – the one that makes an entire song out of three samples, “skate”, “or” and “die”. in SPANK OR DIE!, you would have to spank an arse (nominally, my slut’s) at the word “DIE.” the speed between “SPANK” and “OR” would help you to gauge what time to spank.
Spank or Die, she hopes, will happen in the nearish future.
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