The Mashing
Last week I was up in Barrow-in-Furness, having been invited to take part in Digital Media Labs 2015. It was a fantastic and fulfilling week of creativity and fun, punctured with thought-provoking conversation, plenty of laughs, and – more worryingly – Cliff Richard.
Alongside the process of development that the residency would facilitate, we were asked to prepare a presentation/workshop/skill-sharing activity that would act as our introduction to the other attendees. I'd originally come up with a half-baked idea about Electric Paint-powered modular name badges, which would have been impractical, slow, and messy. This thought dawned on me – conveniently – as I was falling asleep just a week before the Lab, and I realised that I'd have to do something different.
In my sleepy state, I thought that a game would be an excellent idea: one with simple, tried-and-tested mechanics, and an non-intimidating interface that everyone could grasp within a few seconds; The Mashing is a realisation of that tired thought.
The game is very straightforward: two teams of up to five players each have a designated button to press. On-screen are two coloured bars that increase in height with every press. Once a team's bar reaches the top of the screen, they win the game. I made a couple of controllers specifically for playing the game, built to take a good mashing.
I love button-mashing as a game mechanic. It single-handedly held up games like Track & Field, and Daley Thompson's Decathlon, makes for an inclusive – and alcohol-friendly – gaming experience in WarioWare, and is utilised in the Metal Gear series (a personal favourite) to create brilliant high-adrenaline tension; it even gets you out of 'I don't know any moves' situations in Street Fighter and Tekken. Lately though, it's become a symptom of underdeveloped gameplay in big budget console titles. GameSpot's Peter Brown said that, when playing the recent Mad Max video game tie-in, he was able to win fight sequences by not even looking at the screen and just hitting one or two buttons, belying complexity of the animations that are performed by the player character (Assassin's Creed has been hugely guilty of this too, in my opinion).
So The Mashing is – as I tweeted shortly before I completed the game – both a love letter to and a critique of button-mashing. It was also bloody good fun to play, and to behold. If you've got some spare buttons and an Arduino knocking about, download it and give it a try. It's also my admission that games are an important part of my life, and might possibly be part of my future work. Stay tuned.
Download it here (currently Mac only, sorry!)
The top photo was taken by either Benedict Phillips or Glenn Boulter. Make yourselves known!