Kill Screen magazine recently hosted an event at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Titled "Arcade," the party was an offshoot of the museum's Talk to Me exhibit, a project designed to "highlight the groundbreaking ways in which objects help people interact with complex systems and networks." You can read more on that exhibit here, if you like, because I'm not really going to be talking about it in this article. I'll be the first to admit that most of the main exhibit was utterly lost on me. I pretty much just went to check out the games the Kill Screen team had curated for the evening's event.
Many of those games consisted of already released indie favorites like Bit.Trip Beat, Echochrome, Canabalt, QWOP, and Limbo, all projected onto the dimly-lit white walls of the museum like animated art installations. It was a fine selection of games to be sure, albeit a largely familiar one to those in attendance.
Also tucked away in a corner of the museum's second floor was a little unreleased oddity called PXL PUSHR. At first glance, it looks a little like a pixelated version of your typical Kinect minigame, with players attempting to form shapes to match colored pixels that appear in odd places on the screen. Then you notice that the Kinect appears to be hooked up to a computer. Then you notice the iPad on the table next to the TV, as well as the person using it to create the pixel patterns on the screen. Then you realize there's a whole rhythmic element to the game, on top of this newly-realized competitive element. That last part makes particular sense when you meet PXL PUSHR's makers: Harmonix developers Matt Boch and Ryan Challinor.
Boch and Challinor both have extensive experience with Kinect. Both work on the Dance Central team, and have spent their days playing with Microsoft's magical camera technology since its Project Natal infancy. That said, PXL PUSHR isn't something born out of some dream of taking Kinect tech to its next logical evolution, or what have you. In talking to Challinor, the whole thing sounds like it popped up pretty much on a whim. He'd been working in his spare time on a program he'd dubbed "Synapse," a Kinect application specifically designed to interact with any application that can handle OSC events. At some point Boch came along and ideas for an actual game started to percolate. Three weeks later, here the thing sat in a corner of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, with a massive line of people waiting to try it out.
On the surface, PXL PUSHR seems like the same "human Tetris" minigame we've seen a dozen times over since the Kinect launch. Contort your body into various positions to match what the screen demands of you (in this case, covering the highlighted pixels on the screen) in order to progress to the next round. Kinect Adventures has done it, Carnival Games has done it, and Majesco even has a whole game dedicated to the idea.
So what's different here? Apart from the aggressively retro graphics that are about as purposely pixelated as anything in the Bit.Trip series, the trick with PXL PUSHR is that the progression of the game isn't pre-determined, nor is it randomized. Via an iPad hooked up to the same computer as the Kinect sensor (the program supports both Macs and PCs, according to Challinor), a second player uses a gridlike HUD to program where the pixels will appear for their competitor. The game's scoring is entirely based on how many pixels the player on the screen hits, versus how many they miss. Whatever they miss feeds into the iPad player's score.
Oh, and it's all rhythmic. A small, translucent bar moves across the screen in particular time with the background music, and you have to be highlighting whatever pixels happen to be in the bar's path as it moves along. Think Lumines, if you had to frantically run from side to side to hit all the required pixels. Exhausting as that may sound, it's actually quite a lot of fun. The player with the iPad gets the sort of trollish thrill of trying to screw up their opponent, while the player gets a bit of an enjoyable workout trying to contort and dart about, depending on what their tormentor has cooked up.
An iPad and a Kinect working in harmony feels like something out of some weird, hippy-ish Utopian dream. Not that Microsoft and Apple technologies haven't played at least reasonably nice together before, but PXL PUSHR requires them to work in tandem to exist. Homebrew Kinect development is nothing new, and Microsoft has even made a point to support the crazy endeavors of homebrew programmers like Challinor and Boch. Apple is not quite as willing to let people to hack around with their fancy tablets, but in this case, no hacking is really required. Boch and Challinor are simply using an existing sequencer app called TouchOSC to program the in-game action. It's already a fairly customizable app, and it apparently was all the pair needed to allow the other player to do exactly what they wanted them to do.
Perhaps realizing that a relatively limited number of people will have a Kinect, an iPad, and the know-how to hook all these things up to play on a properly-sized screen, Team PXL (as Boch and Challinor are calling themselves for this particular project) plan to simply release the app for free once it's finished. They'll announce its availability via their Twitter account when the thing is "complete," though given its relatively breezy development cycle and whimsical conception, one gets the impression that Boch and Challinor will just keep tweaking PXL PUSHR until they find something else to occupy their time--after all, they were adjusting the live Arcade demo until ten minutes before they opened the doors.
If nothing else, PXL PUSHR is a nifty example of what can happen when developers go beyond developing indie games using expected technologies. The idea of mixing and matching technologies to bend to the will of what the developer aims to do is kind of a fascinating one, when you consider how restrictive console development--and in some cases, even PC development--can be.
Perhaps as time rolls on, we'll see increased examples of programmers and designers finding ways to take two seemingly incompatible pieces of tech and finding creative ways to make them work. Considering all the various pieces of console, computer, and whatever else technology I have lying around my apartment, I certainly wouldn't mind a few interesting excuses to do something unexpected with them.
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