Scott Varland @ ITP

By

Daniel, Jeff, Kate & Scott

The object of Color Code is to break the code
set by the computer, revealing its corresponding image
in the form of an Exquisite Corpse.

The code is a random combination of four colors.
The player is given nine attempts to solve the code
with hints indicating progress after each guess.

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At first, I wasn’t totally sure that a redo of this old (if not ancient) game was going to be significantly different or better than any other incarnation which has sprung up over the last century or so.

MasterMind, the board game, was created by Mordecai Meirowitz (an Israeli Postmaster and Telecommunications expert) and released in 1971 to claim a “Game of the Year” award in 1973; selling 50 million copies in 80 countries. Today, you can play MasterMind at hundreds of internet gaming sites.

It’s similar to a 1960s computer game called “Moo,” and similar to the game Bulls and Cows which has been traced back a century or more. Mathematicians have studied this game. It has been proved “NP complete” – or “Intrinsically interesting to play.” http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0512/0512049.pdf

It’s all here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_%28board_game%29

So what was broken about this game?

After playing for a while on our cheapo plastic consumer unit we quickly realized that a quality board would be a huge improvement. It was a challenging and rich puzzle but not much to look at and the pieces were small and awkward to place. It lacked some extra measure of entertainment, some adventure – some mystique.

We had ideas from huge panels of buttons, dials and switches to a transposition from a game of visual cues to sound. We liked the idea of very tactile colored blocks with a clean interface where the player would work only with four slots.

This turned into a system with two components: A board of four cubed slots and a processing applet to track history and provide clues. One of the biggest questions was how to have the computer sense the guess entered by the player. There was no clear way to do this without a rather complicated switching / sensing mechanism to read the cubes.

We decided to take a leap of faith with photocells on the assumption that it would be possible to judge the color based on the differing opacities of each colored cube. Our first prototype used 1” glass cubes with translucent paint. The board was build with each socket having a white LED and a photocell opposite to each other.

It was very pretty but didn’t too work. Our paint job on the cubes wasn’t uniform; the sockets were not constructed identically; the sensor readings were all over the place. We needed to get each of the 24 cubes to read the correct color in each slot every time.

While RGB sensors would probably have been the most effective solution, there wasn’t the time or know-how to implement them within the deadlines we had been given. Instead, we doggedly pursued the photocell idea, this time with acrylic cubes and a more precise circuitry. Translucent paints wouldn’t provide enough difference in hue so we tried printing label covers for each cube, allowing them to match as closely as possible. After much trial and error, we coaxed it into working – though never at absolut 100% it's pretty damn close.

The Processing applet was at the same time evolving from a simple method for tracking the game’s progress into a visual puzzle inspired by the cadavre exquis (esquisite corpse). This brought the player more rewarding feedback and a goal separate from the central gameplay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

The end result was a re-invigorated, if not new, life for an old game. It seems to be fun to play both in the usual manner and in a new more tactile, more visually dynamic, and more inviting way. I’m quite happy with the results on this. Daniel, Jeff and Kate were most wonderful to work with so I hope we’ll do some more. Already, there’s talk about building our Color Code into a kiosk / photo both.