The Dragon Question project got finished up. But the big news isn't some pop-up storybook, oh no! It's T3tris, our three-player Tetris game! And when I say "our" I mean we took an existing Tetris game and remodeled the controls to work with our physical platform, a table which houses a rotating knob, a sliding knob, and a button. The rotating knob controls the blocks' rotation, the sliding knob controls left-and-right movement, and the button controls the accelerated falling of the blocks.
Sounds simple. Is. But when you play it, you can see that it's a clever little exercise in communication and cooperation. This thing we're doing, giving players three different controls in cooperative games, is something we're calling "asymmetrical cooperative gameplay," a term I don't think has been coined before, and it really gets people playing in new ways. Because everybody has their own job, a job no one else can do, people really seem to get how important communication is.
It's surprisingly fun, too. The unfamiliarity of the control scheme, plus the multiplayer aspect, lets people do really badly without feeling bad. Doing well feels like a triumph against impossible odds.
