The robot goes first. You copy it back.
It holds a sound for a count of seconds. Then it is your turn, and the only control is the phone itself: move it and it answers, hold the movement for the same counts, in the same order. Get it wrong and you lose a heart.
Take a turn against the same rules.
This is the game's own scoring, moved across as it is written: one mark for each whole second you hold, a gap between movements, and the two strings have to match exactly. The sound is the file the app plays, robot.m4a.
The robot
You
On the phone the movement is read by the gyroscope: the app polls it every 0.1 s and counts anything above 0.08 rad/s, averaged across the three axes, as movement; a movement ends once the phone has been still for 1.2 s. A browser has no gyroscope, so here the button stands in for it. Everything else, including the fact that half a second out already counts as a miss, is the game's own arithmetic.
Push the phone up your sleeve first.
Out of sight, the mechanical noises stop belonging to a screen and start belonging to your arm. Wave it about and you are a robot; hold it still and you are not. Children work this out in about four seconds and then follow you around the flat.
The screen is the game's own, caught in the iOS Simulator. What happens next cannot be filmed there at all: a simulator has no gyroscope, so there is nothing to move.
The tasks get longer as you get better.
Nothing is random about the growth: the sequence length and the longest a single movement can run are picked from your score, on this ladder.
| Score | Movements | Each up to |
|---|---|---|
| 0–1 | 1 | up to 2 s |
| 2–5 | 2 | up to 2 s |
| 6–7 | 3 | up to 3 s |
| 8–10 | 4 | up to 3 s |
| 11–13 | 5–6 | up to 3 s |
| 14–16 | 6–7 | up to 4 s |
| 17–19 | 7–8 | up to 4 s |
| 20–22 | 8–9 | up to 5 s |
| 23–25 | 9–10 | up to 5 s |
| 26–29 | 10–11 | up to 6 s |
| 30 and up | 12–15 | up to 7 s |
No movement is ever shorter than a second, and past thirty points the robot is asking for up to fifteen of them in a row.
Hear what your arm would be doing.
These are the files out of the app, not re-recordings.
The track plays under the game while you flail about. Written by Anton Dukanich.
