It’s a chilly night in March in San Francisco and I’m running to a warehouse at the end of a dead-end street in the Mission. I’m late to a party, and not in the way that makes you look cool — the way that makes you look pathetically sober in a crowd of game developers falling over their own feet. But it’s not just the Danish liquor that’s gotten everyone rowdy at this shindig.Even at this late hour, the games projected on the high walls of decaying wood are being played with unfailing enthusiasm. One in particular seems to be causing a disproportionately higher level of chaos, however. B.U.T.T.O.N (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okay Now) is the creation of the party’s hosts, the Copenhagen Game Collective, and it’s not like any videogame you’ve played before.Four players set their game controllers down on the cold concrete floor and walk back 5 paces, keeping a close eye on the screen for the next set of instructions. There’s a brief pause, words flash on the screen and suddenly all hell breaks loose: The players sprint back toward the controllers like their lives depend on it, bashing each other out of the way and blocking others from making the button press they need to win.Each time, the victory conditions are different: “The first person to press their button 5 times wins,” “Anyone who presses their button loses,” and so on. Play it enough and you begin to realize something important: This game is broken. Not in the careless, unfinished sense but broken in that the ambiguous nature of the rules is encouraging players to improvise, cheat and create an environment of general disorder.But we’re not complaining. Catching our breath, we all take another shot of akvavit and line up for another round. Because “broken” is fun.Unstructured fun is something we take for granted when we’re kids and forget how to do when we’re adults. As we age we stop thinking about ‘play’ in terms of roughhousing and improvised playground games. We start to prefer schedules, planning and complex systems of rules; sophisticated games for sophisticated minds. But is this really what we want? And can these adult games ever hope to produce the same kind of elation we experienced in our younger years?Rather than pontificate on that, Copenhagen Game Collective does what they know already works: They build loose but deliberate frameworks that invite spontaneity and randomness into the dynamics of play, rather than discourage it. By allowing a majority of the gameplay to take place in real space and using software that provides a minimal level of interference, CGC is bringing games back to their whimsical roots of improvisation and fun.Unlike B.U.T.T.O.N, their new game Johann Sebastian Joust (above) has no graphics to distract from interacting with the other players. Standing in a circle holding illuminated PS3 motion controllers, players experience something akin to a cross between “Musical Chairs” and “Don’t Drop The Egg.”When the tempo of the music is slowed-down, players must keep their controller as still as possible while attempting to eliminate other players by jostling their controllers. When the music speeds up, the controllers become much less sensitive, allowing significantly more movement and resulting in a sudden outburst of frantic struggle.This isn’t the Collective’s first time doing videogames sans video, however. In Dark Room Sex Game, which occupied a seedy-looking corner in the basement of Babycastles last year during one of their many arcade parties, players use Wii remotes to pantomime… well, you know.From outside the ragged curtain one could only see the curling mists of a fog machine and hear distorted vocalizations of an unmistakably coital nature. But venture inside and you’d find two individuals furiously (or perhaps not so furiously, depending on how weirded out they got) shaking the controllers to evoke virtual climax, interactively narrated by carnal grunts coming from a set of speakers.Naturally, it’s that sense of abusive discomfort that Copenhagen wants to evoke in the players of Dark Room Sex Game. Given only one instruction, " take turns shaking the controller," the players — who are oftentimes total strangers — must fight this intense awkwardness in order to time their motions correctly and succeed.“It was fascinating to see how embarrassed people would get playing it,” said the game’s creator Doug Wilson in an interview with Gamasutra earlier this year. “Because there aren’t any graphics, you and your fellow player often end up looking directly at each other while you coordinate your virtual sex.”In a time when 8 of 10 major E3 game announcements are first-person shooters that teeter on the edge of creative bankruptcy, it seems videogames are long overdue for a dose of weirdness.And this is just the beginning. With B.U.T.T.O.N already available as a download on Xbox Live and an upcoming iPhone/Android version of Johann Sebastian Joust, Copenhagen Game Collective will no doubt be doing more to keep our games strange, rowdy and fun. See more of them and the rest of the indie gaming scene in Motherboard’s documentary on New York City’s DIY arcade, Babycastles.
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