Rabbit-Proof Fencing was a game I wrote and game-designed for, built for a sword-shaped controller that the player swings to fight rabbits and cane toads (both of which are pests in Australia, rabbits for their rapid population growth and cane toads for their poison). It’s a first-person game, in which rabbits and toads hop towards the screen and the player swings the sword to knock them away.
It is also, in almost every way imaginable, the simplest game we could make. We told people to “swing” the sword to attack, but the only moving part of the sword is a mercury switch, which is entirely binary: when the sword is pointing up, it’s not attacking, and when the sword is pointing down, it is. So: if the player lets the sword droop, he’ll hit the enemies every time. The smoke-and-mirrors part of the game was our insistence, as the game’s presenters, that the sword MUST be pointing up when the player isn’t attacking.
It worked. I never saw anybody figure out how the game really worked, though everybody seemed to have their own theory about the best way to swing the sword.
The game’s a semester project now, being developed as a tool for attracting foreign students to the city of Adelaide, for a client called Education Adelaide. I’m not officially part of the project, because I’m on the other side of the planet and I’ve got a project of my own, but I’ll be talking with the team. I don’t know much about the project yet, because the Australian semester hasn’t started yet, but I assume they’ll have to replace the smoke-and-mirrors with full functionality and replace the mercury switch with something safer.
I mean, the mercury was wrapped up, perfectly safe, but people get squeamish around a metal that causes brain damage. So, yeah.
Educate yourself further: Rabbit-Proof Fencing lives here
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