Crayon Physics is an amazing little game that has attracted a lot of attention. It’s wonderful fun to play and it can teach us a little bit about interaction design too. Thanks to Aoife Ni Mhorain for pointing this one out.
Experimental game play
Petri Purho is a student at Helsinki polytechnic. He has set himself the task of producing a new game every week – and each one has to test out a different form of experimental gameplay.
With Crayon Physics, Petri appears to have hit on a winning idea. He’s had such demand for a more complete version that that he’s had to break his own rules and work on a version that will take more than 7 days. There’s a very cool video of it here.
Get out your crayons
As you can see in the pictures, Crayon Physics is styled to look like crayon drawing on an old piece of paper. You create new objects by drawing them – sticks, blocks and balls. And the moment you create those objects they gain physical properties. The fall, they topple, they roll, they land on top of each other.
Fun! And the lessons are?
Lesson 1: Good interaction design builds on things we are familiar with
We’re familiar with all sorts of objects and rules about the world. A folder holds documents. You can put sheets of paper on top of each other on your desk. And you can throw them away in a trash can. The original Xerox PARC interfaces showed how computing could be made approachable by using on-screen metaphors for everyday objects and actions: folders, windows, trashcans.
Crayon physics is easy to learn because it uses the laws of physics we already know. Things fall, things land on top of each other, heavy things can be used to lever light things.
More recently, Apple has been pioneering some advances in this space by incorporating “physics”, now very advanced in the world of 3D games, into its software. The iPhone/iPod interface provides “momentum” – if you’re scrolling through a long list, a good flick of the finger will keep the scrolling going for a while until you put on the brakes again with a stationary finger.
Lesson 2: We want cave-man magic
Everything that computers do for us is to some extent magical. We can create beautifully typeset documents, we can communicate instantly over large distances, and we can move mountains of data with minimal effort.
Drawing a crayon picture and having it come to life is magical. Much more magical than word processing. I think that’s because the activity that crayon physics is simulating is much closer to our most primitive human ways of thinking. Typing on a qwerty keyboard is quite an unnatural thing for us humans, and its history comes from interacting with heavy, mechanical machines. Drawing with a rough coloured stick is very primitive and very appropriate to the way our cave-man brains evolved. Seeing our basic scribbles transformed into moving objects feels very magical indeed.
The next generation of user interfaces, with multitouch and gestures, are all tapping into this. Using two hands to drag, stretch and pinch gets right back to the fundamental activities out brains evolved to perform. And it feels great.
Lesson 3: Sketch prototyping is a great way to think
I wrote recently about the power of sketch prototypes. And Crayon Physics illustrates the point. Some of the puzzles are hard to solve, especially on some of the add-on levels. But you can try out different ideas with very quick sketches and it really helps you build a solution. Sketching really is a great way to think.
Anyway – enjoy Crayon Physics. And If you get bored of that, the Experimental Game play Project has about 360 other innovative games to try. I think I’ll try “Tower of Goo” next…