Solving a Video Puzzle Is a Movable Feat

Back - Index - Submissions - - What is RSS? Date: Oct 22, 2099 Source: The New York Times Submitted By: Liquid Fluid October 14, 1999 GAME THEORY Solving a Video Puzzle Is a Movable Feat By J.C. HERZ If I were saying this on TV, I would request a wig and disguise my voice. Because I have something to say, and it needs to be heard. But it's deeply embarrassing, and potentially damaging to my reputation. I've been struggling with this for a while now. And I think at this point, it's best to be honest with myself and my readers. The thing is . . . (deep breath) . . . The Backstreet Boys Puzzles in Motion CD-ROM -- I love it. It's fantastic. It's (I can't believe I'm saying this) a really elegant piece of interactive media. It's sophisticated, intellectually challenging, even (God help me) classic. The concept is deceptively simple: take a video clip and divide it into square pieces. Shuffle the pieces. The player shifts them around to reassemble the video image. That is more challenging than it sounds, for a few reasons. First of all, each piece is itself a moving image. It's impossible to align adjoining contours because every area of the picture changes from one moment to the next. So you can't work from an understanding of the still image (trying to solve the puzzle as you would a static jigsaw will actually impede your progress). You have to formulate some separate understanding of how a moving image fractures. Also, on higher difficulty levels the pieces are not only shuffled but also rotated or flipped. So you have to move them around and figure out whether they're upside down or inverted laterally or vertically. It's a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle whose colors and shapes are always shifting, which is pretty innovative as these things go. Now, you might argue that the video image itself is arbitrary. The Backstreet Boys were a good choice for commercial reasons, but the designers could just as easily have used a piece of avant-garde performance art and the puzzle would have worked equally well. You would be wrong. Oddly enough, there is something about Backstreet Boys music videos that accentuates the puzzle-solving experience. The disk contains five tracks from the band's first album (all the bouncy pop confections you can't escape on the radio). The music plays while you're working on these challenging visual problems, which are purely cerebral. Backstreet Boys music makes a set of puzzles seem easier. But -- this is the scary part -- if you turn the music off, it takes you longer to solve the puzzles. I tried substituting other kinds of music -- jazz, rock, techno, punk, big band standards, you name it. The results were better than with no music, but not as good as with the Backstreet Boys singles. There is something about those inane pop structures that enhances visual problem-solving ability. Furthermore, music videos are ideally suited to kinetic puzzles because there's so much movement in the frame. A landscape epic or psychological drama wouldn't work nearly as well because it would be easy to assemble pieces from long, static shots or big reaction shots. "Empire of the Sun" would be a snap. MTV popcorn is a real challenge. The Backstreet Boys are even more of a brain teaser because they're a matching set. It's quite a task to determine which pouty mouth goes with which bare chest and well-toned set of abdominal muscles. Of course, it's nothing a junior high school girl can't handle, particularly if she already has pictures of the band members plastered to her bedroom walls. There is a vast population that can identify individual Backstreet Boys' chins and ears in a split-second at a hundred paces. For people who have already assembled a Backstreet Boys collage from the pages of Tiger Beat magazine, the video puzzles are probably no big deal. Except here, the images have an ostensible purpose beyond swoony teen-idol worship. If you're working on a brain puzzle, it's like, totally necessary to focus on the Backstreet Boys playing beach volleyball, or walking in silhouette against an ocean sunset, or running down a hallway in white suits and candy-colored shirts, or on Nick -- the floppy-haired blond kid -- bopping around in a mummy bondage costume. Not that I would voluntarily do that if I weren't evaluating a computer game, as part of my job. It's not as though I have a stash of Backstreet Boys fanzines in my desk drawer or spend my spare time trolling for teeny-bopper trivia on the Internet. But if you're going to manipulate pictures of human beings on a computer screen, they might as well be pictures of instant pop stars whose careers and identities have been manufactured by global media corporations. Bands fall in and out of favor, but the puzzle stays fresh because it can replace them. (An 'N Sync version is already in the pipeline.) If anyone was wondering what kind of computer games preteen-age girls are likely to play, look no further. Follow the hormones. Backstreet Boys Puzzles in Motion, published by Ravensburger; CD-ROM for Mac and Windows 95 and 98; $29.95; for all ages. Comment on this item. Next Item: Fairway to Heaven Prev Item: Backstreet Boys are rage of the age