Stumbling Together: Knightmare Doom

[davidn]

Two videos in the same weekend? Madness! Blasphemy! Lawsuit! But this one was far easier than the huge Prince project - here, Quadralien and I play Doom Knightmare-style, as in the 80s programme where someone was put into a virtual dungeon and had to be guided to avoid falling down chasms, being cut up by giant circular saws or burned alive. Great times. In practical terms, this means that there's one of us with the keyboard, having to be guided by the other who has the screen. Can we play successfully like this? Not really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ29d2FMGkI&hd=1

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Every time I see one of these, I feel like putting “normal” humans in it (along a specific axis) is like sending dolphins to do the hundred-meter dash on land. Or perhaps like QWOP. Yeesh.

I suppose people wouldn't find it as fun to try it with me, maybe. The first thing I'd do would be establish a vocabulary of procedure words and run practice calibrations on any continuously-valued controls. (Which is basically what humans do too when put in more serious situations! Except they have to put in a “training context” of some kind before their minds will accept it, for some reason or maybe no reason, but if you look at military and aviation radiotelephony, for instance… a big difference would seem to be that the continuous stuff often uses instruments instead, which is cheating here, and that's more obviously harder to manage because the continuous-sense calibration on neurons is really wonky and you can't just unwonk it by leaning on contrast enhancement (like you often can with discretely-valued distinguishers) because that fouls the very thing you're trying to fix up.) Which would probably make the person on the receiving end go “bwuh”. Or of course if I were on the receiving end I wouldn't get to decide that unless I could use an awful lot of feedback and have it acknowledged—that could be interesting in a different way…