NYU Poly students will play ‘ping pong platform’ video game during finals

The Game Innovation Lab at NYU Poly will give students on campus a way to unwind that no other campus has, a video game played with a ping pong table. Not video game ping pong, but a game that’s played on a ping pong table.

It uses the MIT Media Lab‘s Ping Pong Plus platform, and it came out of a game jam organized by the lab that wrapped up entries on May 1.

The winning game from the jam was “Moon Breaker” made by Eddie Melcer, a PhD student. In it, players try to destroy as much of the land on their opponent’s side of the board as they can by hitting it with a ping pong ball. One of the toughest tricks to learn in playing it is that you don’t need to let the ball bounce once on your side before hitting it. In fact, if you can get to it before it bounces you prevent damage to your side and can deliver more to your opponent. Also, there are bombs.

The game will be available for play all next week, during NYU Poly’s Finals Week, inside the Game Innovation Lab.

This sort of creation is typical of the space, which is experimenting with gamifying (sort of) its door lock and working with Bell Labs to put some fun into surveillance cameras, according to its director, Katherine Isbister. It’s also exploring deeper questions, such as one that Isbister raised while we were talking to her, “How do you test if people had fun?”The Game Innovation Lab sponsors the Indie Tech Talks, such as the talk by Anna Kipnis that we wrote about last week.

Here are some photos we took inside the space:

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