Cursors

Dev here. There's an editor at http://cursors.io?editor, but it can't submit the level to me yet. But you can type "generateCode();" and put it on pastebin and email it to me at me [at] m28.io and I'll put it in game if I like it.

My server is getting hammered pretty hard, that's the reason for the disconnects. The spike caused by hn: http://d.m28.io/ZCWdy0m1DHOG.png

I'm gonna sleep now but ask anything and I'll reply when I get up.

Edit: Sleeping is not an option anymore, the server is having some... troubles.

I started playing this while some code was compiling and ended up getting completely sucked in.

That giddy thrill of enabling a restless mass of fellow cursors to rush through a gate, or the temporary, unspoken bond between the lone cursor selflessly manning a button and the new arrival sidling up to them to see if they want to change shifts... there's a lot going on in this seemingly simple game. I'm glad I got to play while it's at critical mass.

(Developers, are you logging the cursor movements? This would be fascinating to analyze later.)

Ooof, it's over. Some levels is more tragic and ironic than Hollywood movies. I've known a cursor who always clicking as if he cheering to everybody. Funny guy. There was two friendly cursors at the maze and they never stoped to draw a lines and moved together, side by side. "Leave me, save yourself!" - I said to other brave cursor, but he stayed on the blue square and didn't want to escape the level.

This is so much fun. It's kind of like RPG. There are 3 character classes. 1. Asshole: just goes straight after the green square. 2. Prankster: draws arrows pointing to the wrong exits. 3. Batman: stays on the button and clicks.

I've tried all three characters. Playing prankster is fun (I was a true trickster and sometimes drew the right arrow). Playing asshole is boring. Playing Batman is ok.

My apologies to all the guys/gals who followed the wrong arrow.

Many, many thanks to the author.

Also, I haven't seen so many poorly drawn dicks and swastikas since grade school.

Wow! There is so much going on here. I can't believe you're not logging!

* First it starts out as a simple maze puzzle game.

* Then it there're weird layouts where people are clicking stuff, and pathways are opening up randomly.

* Then you realise it's not random at all, people have to click things for pathways to open.

* Then you realise someone has to stay behind and sacrifice themselves for other people to go through.

* Then there're levels where multiple people have to coordinate and click at the same time to open n layers gates.

* Then there're levels where not only do you have to stay behind, you have to go out of your way to do so. So you'll be letting people through for a while, you realise, as it's more efficient for the group as a whole. At some point you have to decide you've taken your turn and you move towards the main gate and wait, and then new people come and then they have to realise to go to press the key.

* So next level you see someone sacrificing themselves and you decide instead to go take their place and wiggle your mouse to tell them to go. "I got this", you indicate.

* Now some people have got it into their head this is all about cooperation and selflessness. So you can be waiting in one of these buttons in the middle of nowhere, letting people through for a minute, and a new guy will start making their way towards you to let you go, and you draw "thanks" on your way out, they wiggle their mouse to say "welcome" and off you go, leaving them behind.

* On some levels, not only did people have to coordinate at the same time, but things had to be done in sequence. On one, there wasn't enough people to hit all buttons at once, so we coordinated where you would unwrap the "outer" layer of wall protecting the exit, and a couple people would move inside, then you'd unwrap another inner layer, and so on, until they could get out. Finally, you'd decide your turn was over and go wait the same way. It took quite a while before this was figured out collectively -- but once newcomers saw how it was done it went in one smooth operation until I got out and onto another maze.

And that's to say nothing of the selfish people who just passed through maze after maze. In one maze people were waiting, and I and another were at the buttons, but there was one other. One of them had to realise they needed to sacrifice themselves. We were both wiggling our mouses to indicate so, but they didn't see it.

There's also the way people will follow you in the maze if you look confident, and the way people will draw on the right exit to help people out. I'd try to leave a trail if I'd had the right exit cracked in the maze.

In a way I think the inability to write and communicate is fantastic: you can't just tell someone "do this". They have to figure out that they need to collaborate, they have to have some kind of intuitive social empathy that puts the needs of the many against the needs of the few.

Genuinely, mate, this is the most fascinating "game" I've played in a long time. And I can't believe you're not logging it all! I'm sure game theorists and psychologists would love to get their hands on this kind of data. I thought it was a real experiment done for research.

Glad I got to play this while 700 people were on it, I think that really made for some great interactions. It felt like being part of some kind of military team.

I love how there's no way to stick out from the crowd, you could be selfish or selfless when ever you want and no one will be able to recognize you as soon as you blend in with the other cursors. Only you know how you behaved.

I decided to be one of the dancing cursors pointing to the right exit on the early stage, it was so fun to watch the difference in throughput when someone was dancing vs not. Almost everyone went straight for the dancer if there was one and just went 1 by 1 otherwise.

The band Kilo had a "crowdsourced music video" based on the same concept: http://donottouch.org/

Everyone seems to be loving it, but doesn't work for me. I don't control any of the cursors. There's a message in the bottom corner "Area too full, drawing is disabled". Latest Firefox.

Reminds me of cursor*10[1]. I always wanted an actual multiplayer version of it -- awesome!

[1] http://nekogames.jp/g.html?gid=CURSOR10

I love it. I learn to be sometimes sacrificing myself and sometimes to be selfish enough.

Ps: I just realized you can draw something on board. Hint: Press and hold Ctrl.

In that level where the buttons are deep into a maze, I punished jerks who wouldn't do their part by clicking the button until it reaches 1, but no more. For a good 30s, there was a group at the gate drawing hateful messages to me. I'd been there for a good 5 min helping people out, and letting others through. The ones that were waiting had not travelled anywhere close to a button, they'd only been waiting at the gate for others to sacrifice themselves for them. Then one of them eventually gave up and came to replace me. What a bunch of assholes.

That's not everybody of course, but the later in the levels you go, the higher the proportion of jerks you'd meet. This, I guess, because the ones who aren't jerks take more time to move forward in the levels, while jerks move faster.

So while jerks can't reach the next level without the presence of good-doers, there still less and less good-doers as you progress forward. There's also attrition in good-doers along the way from:

    - Connections timing out or otherwise erroring.
    - People giving up.

And the further you move in the levels, the higher the jerk proportion so the longer it takes a good-doer to move forward, increasing the probability that one of the two attrition causes occur.

So it's possible that good-doers never make it to the end of the game (and thus nobody). In fact, if the game has enough levels, I'd be surprised if anyone ever managed to finish it without deliberate coordination by a group of good-doers.

All that to say, this game is really interesting.

The challenge is not to simply finish the game, but to finish the game before it disconnects :D

So, I just completed the "curiosity killed the mouse" level, took 3 people a while to realise what was going on, but after a few minutes we got to the non-obvious solution, and I got sent back to the first level. I feel a bit screwed over now... =|

Playing this was a mistake on my part considering I have plenty of networking HW due tomorrow, but then again looking at HN was the first mistake. Great job! It's a simple game that ended up being significantly more fun than I thought it would be.

So much fun, great to see how people work together to help each other win.

I gave up on the one where you had to squeeze through a bunch of narrow red pathways, it's not so easy on a trackpad.

This is way more interesting than I thought it'd be. I bet it was a blast to build, too.

This is pure genius. I was amazed at the self-emerging cyclical selfish & altruist behaviors.

Good job, mate.

Anybody figured how to get gold in "You can't get always what you want"?

I really wanted to see how many people were at each level, to get a sense of how far up the tower this goes, and how many people were up top, and how soon I'd get there.

It'd also be cool if the higher up you go, you can see a previous level, and affect it in some way, like helping more cursors get up to your level, or hinder them to be evil.

Interesting but it lost me when I had start to have to do pixel accurate manoeuvring. That was challenging when I was 16, but it feels so pointless now (30 years later).

By the way, apparently it doesn't work with the ad on the bottom turned off by either NoScript or Adblock (connection to server lost).

Interesting CPU performance in Chrome on Ubuntu!

Relating to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8471049 (Google chrome helper amok in OSX HN thread)

While playing Cursors my chrome CPU usage went through-the-roof! Just like OSX 60-80%+ CPU usage on that page. Side-by-side comparison with a mac at cursors.io had identical CPU (so may just be the load of the app).

Just did a side-by-side comparison with Mozilla in Ubuntu showed no higher than 15% for about 90 seconds, but actually ended up jumping to 100%

*Edit: The mozilla cpu jump was related to cursor hiding. Otherwise the crazy cpu usage is entirely gone. The issue persists in chrome.

I get nothing either in Firefox or Chrome :(

Firefox says:

> SecurityError: The operation is insecure. client_out.js:30

Chrome says:

> Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

Unfortunately I got the message "Lost Connection to Server", after I had made significant progress, and had to start over.

But all in all, I think it's a very interesting (and fun) game. The only part which concerns me is the fact that it's multiplayer only, which means as people lose interest over time it simply won't be playable. But, then again I don't see how the mechanics would translate to single player only, unless the other mouse cursors were controlled by bots with different algorithms to simulate various humans playstyles.

The experience is so good! Though I wish there was some way to save state after connection lost. I have lost it a couple of times now probably because of load and it starts over every time.

recorded a video of my experience (1h40m with level bookmarks in description):

http://youtu.be/vtuZlufpfag

truly great idea. thanks for the game!

Hey! It needs save the progress!! :-(

The level that really made me smile was one with about twenty "exits", only one of which was real.

One of the cursors sat by the real one and danced invitingly until everyone noticed.

"Warning: Next iteration in a genre of basic addiction games."

These games really are impressive though. I wonder if there's been a good thesis written on them yet.

Loved the game. There is one level where you have to push 4 buttons to open barriers. But 1 player if fast enough can push 3 of them and you get glitched through last one. So I was trying to get one cursor through, clicking every button 5 times, but I was just a bit too slow. Then he just came to my place and wiggled "hey move on its my turn to help". He was fast enough and I moved on...

You have to love the game theory behind this. In order to get through the later levels you have to be a bit selfish and take the oppurtunity of going for the green square at other people's expense. The most interesting part is once you get to the last few levels where everyone is selfish. Makes for difficult times passing the level :)

Props to the dev for creating a simple game that is a huge amount of fun!

OK can someone describe what on earth this is. I've tried twice - once I ended up in a maze with a load of other mouse cursors and no indication of what to do (I spent a couple of minutes moving around towards some coloured squares but ultimately nothing happened). The other time I was in a white screen that said "press shift and click to draw" but doing so did nothing :-/

Just a heads up, I'm on a touch screen and can abuse those pink parts pretty easily by just tapping the screen on the other side of them.

Awesome app. It reminds me of a thing I made, http://www.theinfinitemaze.com/

One thing I did on that site which could be useful here: aid the mouse movement with a A* search with limited depth, so that the game cursor moves toward the actual cursor a little more instead of blocking when there is a wall in the way.

Curiosity killed the mouse...

Broken in Safari -

    [Error] TypeError: undefined is not a function (evaluating 'w.requestPointerLock()')
    	ma (client_out.js, line 1)

(As the error suggests, checking the 'no pointer lock' button fixes it, but it shouldn't be silently failing.)

Edit: Ouch, I was disconnected from the server after getting several levels in.

I went AFK after reaching a particularly hard level, and came back to "Lost connection to server." Apparently it boots you if you're AFK for more than a minute or two.

A bit frustrating, considering how much "work" I put in to get to that point.

It's hands-down the best HTML 5 game experience I've ever had. I look forward to more.

Loving the anonymous "mob psychology" patterns that can be seen whilst playing the game, the cursors makes it look like we're observing a swarm of (intelligent) flies :)

Also funny to witness in the harder levels most cursors getting slower and slower as to avoid having to start again :)

Lots of fun, most fun is at the end of the game. A lot of drawing took place on the end level, was fun :D

Just completed the game. Amazed me how "selfish" some players were. Although it's hard to communicate actions - and harder still to differentiate players - it did seem that I spend much longer helping players who just camped by the exit.

Ugh. Two cursors are trolling the first level. They put their cursors on the block that can't have any on it, and so it prevents anyone playing from moving on :/

Would be awesome to kick cursors who haven't moved off a toggle in x many minutes...

Very nice game, I just wasted a bit of my time trying to get through the levels :) which is always a good indication if you ask me.

On another note: 1) can you provide 1/2 links to the JS cursor API behind the game? 2) Do you plan to open source it?

Keep up the nice work

Crashed twice on me now (other players stop moving, and the game stops responding to input).

IndexSizeError: Index or size is negative or greater than the allowed amount

Somewhere on line 18 of client_out.js, which is probably not very helpful because the source is minified.

I was going to post asking for level numbers to be displayed, but then I read through the comments here and actually enjoyed reading people's stories about levels and having to describe them in terms other than "level #53".

We did a quiz game with cursor sharing earlier this year here: http://artefutureplay-20905.onmodulus.net/play/p (DE/FR lang only)

Dev - The game is really creative and addictive! I am a Ph.D. student and I would like to use the game as a platform for research. Do you plan on making the logs available any time? Would you be interested in this direction?

The only downside is when disconnection occurs, the game gets reset, frustrating :(

Trying to get it on reddit too: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2jowld/cursors/

Finally finished it, now I can get back to whatever I was doing a couple of hours ago.

http://i.imgur.com/ZUTUZ6L.png

I just finished a long coding session (it's 3AM here), and was about to go to sleep before I saw this. Looks like I won't be going to bed for awhile longer... :)

I would like the cursor to change color slowly as it ages on each level. This way you can see who's been in that level for a long time and who's just arriving.

This level is impossible to get past if somebody leaves the exit area.

http://i.imgur.com/wBK3pKo.png

Wow! First impression: this is stupid. Played for two minutes, couldn't stop for a 15 minutes. Congrats on creating a truly fun game from a simple idea.

I love it. :) Small suggestion: make the cursor slide against walls rather than getting stuck (at least it gets stuck on walls for me in Chrome).

This was fun, thx! Nicknames or custom colorable cursor might be a nice addition so you can identify your peers. Or it may ruin it, not sure.

To 'skip' the narrow passages: google "Move mouse with cursor keys" ;} programmatically: CGWarpMouseCursorPosition on mac

Interesting game, and nice little "success" with the amount of concurrent players. Any ideas how to monetize something like that?

Thanks to this game I finally decided to upgrade my ball mouse to LASER.

(and unfortunately I got "disconnected from server" about 15 levels in)

"Connection to server lost"

I had myself convinced for a few minutes it was just a clever way to end the game when you got to the last level.

Definitely a Titan game! I like that people are requesting saved progress.

Uh no, you're a cursor, get back out there as a fresh cursor...

I just made a bunch of people go crazy drawing on one level. It took me 30 minutes trying to get someone draw anything.

Is that gold thing real? Any way to go in?

A simulated social experiment it is. This is pretty much how societies will need to be like. WIN - WIN - WIN!

When I open the link it says "Lost connection to server". Is anyone getting the same message?

How did you solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting your first dozens of concurrent users, author?

Nice game! I did not think i would finish, but it kept me hooked. The cooperation mechanics were fun.

Lost connection to server a couple times now. Gets old trying to get through the beginning levels.

Are there any safeguards against bots? Or could someone just sit on a # tile while auto-clicking?

Lost connection to server??? NOOOOO

This reminds me of an app that I built ~6 years ago http://cursorlog.appspot.com/ - it's not working now, some JS error with `this.hidden` :(

Source code here https://code.google.com/p/cursorlog/

Wonderful Gamee! Would you tell us which technologies & APIs have you implemented? thx!

For the first five minutes I kept worrying it was going to be a scream (see Maze Game).

This gives RSI faster than Emacs

The Ending screen is the best thing since using Paint on Windows 3.11 :D

Awesome, reminds me of Antichamber, especially the little hints given.

I got a "Lost connection to server" Anything went wrong?

Have you made any changes recently/do you have a changelog?

Simply amazing. Shows team work, sacrifice, cooperation. Nice!!!

Thank you so much for releasing this not on a weekday :)

Has anyone finished?

This is awesome, you totally need to make cursor RPG.

I want to buy this game now. <3 The server hurts.

Teasing people after hacking in noclip is quite fun.

How many levels are there? I played until about 12

Got to big maze and... "Connection Lost"

Ugh, as soon as I get far I get disconnected....

Now it's stuck in a stage forever :/

This is insanely fun. Thanks so much.

why is there a lost connection with the server?

Is the game server connecting to the webserver via private ip?

This was a lot of fun, well made!

Thanks for this! It was a blast!

This is soooo addictive.

This is the best game!

Cool game, love it.

And it's dead.

WTB tutorial :D

My head hurts.

I love it.

any cheat page yet?

awesome

Omg! I couldn't stop playing.

what is the technology behind this. this is amazing.