Lattice

Lattice is a cooperative, five-player Game Boy game controlled not with buttons and joysticks but through the act of holding hands. Players win by collectively directing the avatar to the end of a pixelated maze using jumper wires and a USB circuit board with preprogrammed directions.

This research-creation game was created in GB Studio as a prototype to answer the following research creation questions:

• How does interface alter the way we engage with games and with humans? 
• Is it possible to build trust and companionship directly into game mechanics? 
• What does the intimate act of holding hands do to a standard game form (the RPG maze)? 
• How are decisions (at moral or spatial crossroads) negotiated between players?

The goal behind Lattice was to convey a feeling of trust and companionship through interface. I wanted to transpose the intimacy between hands and hardware onto an intimacy between players. The prototype harnessed the affordances of the MaKey MaKey to impinge on human conductivity to catalyze in-game action; players collectively explored the game world as the controller rather than through it.

You can see how the game was played during playtests at https://www.alexcustodio.com/lattice