Design Journal - Physical meets Digital

While I was overseas in the last 6 months I went to a lot McDonalds, so much so that I have vowed never to eat there for a meal again. But in one of these chow-down, Mickey D’s snack adventures I came across something that was going to make my trip and my travelling friend’s far more enjoyable. In Spain in Barcelona they had the most fun, most entertaining and coolest happy meal toy any kid or adult could ever possibly receive, the toy of course: Connect 4.

So my friend and I used to play this game over and over until eventually we got sick of the game and kind of mean towards each other. So about 1 month after having the toy I started to get creative and come up with new ways we could play.

Here are a few new games that can be played with a simple set

Reverse Connect 4 - having the pieces come up from the bottom, you still need to get 4 in a row but this is a lot more brain draining than you can imaging, dropping in the top is easy but when you put in a piece this way all the other pieces get shuffled up.

Orbit Connect 4 - The centre 4 pieces are already there in a checked pattern and you can drop a piece in any direction just so long as it doesn’t float on through to infinity.

Rotation Connect 4 - basically the direction you can drop pieces in each time gets rotated and the pieces fall towards gravity respectively each time.

Connect 4 War - you can put pieces in whenever you want/can but you have to have the pieces 3 meters away and run over to get them. You can only bring 1 at a time.

Pub Connect 4 - we also included a new version where you were asked questions from various places and got to drop a piece down only when you answered correctly.

On the subject of physical games, another game idea I came up with and have since tried is this: thumbwars – I just tried to remake the game now but it doesn’t work on my laptop because I can only press 3 keys down at once, so anyone who wants to finish the game again below is the fla and swf.

The way the game works: Find yourself a friend and a keyboard you don’t mind destroying. You play the game by keeping your 4 fingers on the keys and cannot remove them, player one takes asdf and player 2 takes hjkl then you lock thumbs and attempt to remove their fingers from the keys. Sorry to the green room for the keyboard with the strange feeling to the F key too, we put it back on best we could.

I have always been interested in combining real world play with computer play I think the best example can be found with the new Nintendo wii where essentially gestures are used to modify game play.

Play Thumbwars

Download Fla