Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon is the kind of game that is easy to understand but very hard to master and very addictive. The rules are simple, you control a triangle around a hexagon shape and with this triangle you need to dodge walls that move towards the hexagon. The only controls you have are left and right, that’s it. But what seems like a simple game quickly becomes devilishly hard. The walls “attack” you from all sides and you get immediately the feeling that you’re being overrun. There is no winning in this game, it is all about how long you can dodge the walls and survive. To give you an indication of how hard this is, my best time so far is about 20 seconds.
But it is exactly this high difficulty level that makes Super Hexagon so addictive. Most rounds take between 10 or 20 seconds, and as soon as you fail you tap the screen and start again. There is no waiting involved and you always have the feeling that you can do better. There is also a great sense of progression, in my first rounds I couldn’t even get to 6 seconds but you quickly come in a flow where you keep beating your own high score. It is the ultimate mobile game, that you will start playing everywhere, as soon as you have some free time.
The Wikipedia Game
Back on high school we had to work a lot with computers during classes, to do research on the internet or to write papers. It was strictly forbidden to play games or to do anything other than studying, but this of course didn’t stop us from trying to play games anyway. To do this we had to come up with clever disguises for our game playing activities, one of which was The Wikipedia Game.
The Wikipedia Game is a game for 2 or more players, everyone having their own computer and access to Wikipedia. The goal of the game is to get from one Wikipedia page to another as quick as possible, by only using the blue links. So one player starts by choosing a starting page (“Sesame Street”) and an end goal (“eclipse”) and on the count of three all the players try to get from the Sesame Street page to the one about eclipse. The player who is the fastest is the winner and he or she gets to pick the start and end pages for the next game.
This was the perfect game to secretly play during classes. It was always exciting and it required a surprising amount of thinking. You had to connect subjects with each other and in your mind you tried to make a map of connections between subjects. Also, the teacher didn’t suspect a thing, because students visiting Wikipedia had to be studying, right?