Drunk Badger-Baiting for Nerds Is Amazing

At first sight it looks like badger-baiting, but with nerds: a cluster of slightly overweight men and mysterious women, shuffling around in a courtyard just off of Brick Lane, parrying and thrusting with things that resemble those neon-tipped sticks you guide airplanes onto the runway with. The sticks are actually PlayStation Move controllers, however, while the courtyard is the setting for Wild Rumpus, an evening celebrating the best in indie game development. And, tonight, the reason we’re all standing here, freezing cold and getting drunk, is because of a strange new(ish) game called Johann Sebastian Joust.

Johann Sebastian Joust comes up whenever you ask anybody involved with development whether there’s ever been a good game built around motion controls (I imagine that this is something the majority you do often). Since the arrival of the Wii, motion controls have been a big deal, after all. Nintendo kicked things off with Playmobil versions of tennis and bowling, and now Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has a dinky little camera called Kinect that sometimes comes heroically close to working properly. Then there's PlayStation’s Move, a kind of glowing, fetishised ice-cream cone packed with accelerometers and magnets. All these peripherals take slightly different approaches, but they have one crucial thing in common: most of their games are so bad that you’ll think their developers are being dicks on purpose.

Joust isn’t like that. For one thing, it does away with the actual console. For another, it does away with the television, too. It just keeps the Move controller itself – generally five or six of them, as it happens, although the rumour going around tonight is that Die Gute Fabrik, Joust’s creators, have just managed to get 16 of them connected via Bluetooth. Everybody’s excited about this – Wild Rumpus gathers the kind of person that doesn’t mind putting “Bluetooth” and “excited” together in a sentence without wanting to shoot themselves – but there are more pressing things to think about. Things like being killed by a stranger.

Some people playing Johann Sebastian Joust. Please forgive the soundtrack, this video was made by Scandinavians.

The idea behind Joust is pretty straightforward. It’s a parlour game when you strip away the technology: it has the same boozy kind of personality, and it encourages the same sort of intense competitive camaraderie amongst its players. Each Jouster is given a Move controller, and they’re calibrated so that a short, sharp movement will turn the glowing bulb on top of the handset red, putting you out of the action. Your objective is to kill off all of your rivals, one by one, by getting them to shake their own controllers too quickly. As an added wrinkle, the whole thing is set to a selection of excerpts from the Brandenberg concertos. When the music is playing slowly, you have to move slowly with it. When the music gets faster, your Move controller becomes less sensitive, and you can race around a little more.

So it’s a game about kicking strangers, in other words, and at first, it’s pleasantly awkward to play. Most of us aren’t used to lunging at people we’ve never met before in order to get them to jump, and a lot of Joust players tend to struggle for a few seconds to get into character. For my first handful of games, I cringed myself to death with depressing regularity, spasming my controller into the red from sheer embarrassment. Play a little longer, though – get through the social barrier – and you’ll start to see how special Joust is (as well as how transformative it can be).

Three games in, with a decent crowd gathered, one of my many new enemies pulls off his scarf and starts flailing it around in front of him. Grand mal seizure? Not this time, sadly. “Whip!” someone in the audience yells, and for the next few seconds, it is a whip: the kind of thing Indiana Jones might brandish if a boulder had just chased him through a branch of Edinburgh Woollen Mill. Later on, the match has been reduced to just two people: they end up facing off on top of a nearby picnic table. On one hand, it’s like watching the shittiest version of The Princess Bride imaginable, with the stunts performed by ageing arthritics. On the other hand, it’s a video game that can release peoples’ inner buccaneers. Which, considering the common stereotype of gamers (one that I in no way strive to dispel) is amazing, really.

Joust’s being doing the rounds for a while, now, and I suspect the creators don’t quite know what to do with it. For one thing, it’s using Sony peripherals but runs off of Mac OSX, which is hardly a recipe for mainstream success. For another, Die Gute Fabrik has a blurb on the studio’s website that admits they don’t quite know what to do with it. Due to its strange set-up, Joust is probably fated for a rather odd life. Move controllers aren’t cheap, you need at least five of them to get a good game going, and they’re stuffed with the kind of technology that means they would presumably be too expensive to manufacture as bespoke versions. You need a good, energetic crowd, and a wide-open space to keep the casualties to a minimum. As such, it’s probably going to be one of those unusual games that you have to actually go to see. It’s a night out rather than a night in.

It’s definitely worth a night out, though. I can’t remember the last game that I thought was as clever, as witty and as thrifty in its playfulness as this one. Like Monopoly, it imposes rules on you that will turn you into somebody else. Like Twister, it’s an easy win for sexual predators. Motion control’s got its killer-app, and nerds finally have their own version of badger-baiting. Video games just levelled up.

Illustration by Cei Willis

Previously: Why Are Unboxers So Weird and Stupid?