Jonathan Seguin's Mouse Hack

Minesweep!

I had a lot of trouble deciding what I wanted to do for my mouse hack. I had a variety of ideas involving creating some sort of novelty by re-purposing the mouse as a different, but pre-existing object: a guitar, a windmill, a piano, so on and so forth. All of these ideas I felt were clever in a technical aspect, but none of them left me feeling satisfied with the end experience. So for my project I set out to develop an experience instead of a technically complex hack.

The idea I came up with was to re-purpose the mouse as a mine detector. I felt the experience of walking through a mine field, where one false step could mean your end, created a very tense and exhilarating environment for game play.

The game functioned as follows:

• Players would navigate through a space with boundaries set in the form of a rectangle.
• The goal would be to make it from one end of the space to the other end without running into any mines.
• Players however would not be given any visual cues to where the mines were planted. Originally the plan was to blind fold participants in order to have them focus on using their other senses (hearing).
• As players approached a mine with their mine detector, a beeping noise would play. The closer a player moves to a mine the fast the beeping would play.
• By using the beeping sound players should be able to navigate carefully to the other side without meeting their dooms.

Additionally I decided it would be good for those observing to be able to monitor the situation more clearly so they could see whether or not their contestant was poised for doom. This actually created another form of feedback for the player to take heed of. The level of anxiety in the audience is directly expressed to the player as they move through the field giving them another way to gauge how well they're doing.

Projected opposite the back of the player is an overview of the player's position and mine positions.

In terms of improvements there are a few obvious things I would like to address:

• Install a mouse friendly surface for contestants to play on. Tracking the player's movements on a dirty floor was one of the major elements that detracted from this experience.
• Adding a timer: If a timer was included it opens up the option for either a scoreboard, so that players can compete against each other's times; or an additional mode of difficulty such that players need to reach the end of the field within a certain time frame.
• Stronger Visuals: I felt that the visuals were more of a rough prototype and that there was much room for improvement. Perhaps a better reward screen for completing the challenge, and perhaps implementing a camera to capture the reactions of contestants when have blown themselves up.