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                        Reading Too Much into Pong Wars

   Adam Engst

   Jason Kottke recently said he could spend all day watching Koen van
   Gilst's [1]Pong Wars, a JavaScript-based mashup of [2]Pong and
   [3]Breakout (designed by Steve Wozniak with help from Steve Jobs) that
   feels like a hyperactive digital lava lamp. Pong Wars features two
   balls, Day and Night, that bounce according to the physics of those
   games. The Day ball travels through light areas and turns dark blocks
   light, whereas the Night ball does the reverse, turning light blocks
   dark.

   Simple though it is, Pong Wars is mesmerizing. I couldn't prevent my
   brain from rooting for the underdog ('Go, Day!'), wondering how
   unbalanced the score could get (Night always led and briefly exceeded
   800 of the 1024 possible points), assigning narrative to the onscreen
   actions ('Watch out, he's got a groove going on the bottom.'), and
   reflecting on whether it was playing out larger themes of good versus
   evil (or at least [4]Spy vs Spy).

   Taking Kottke's comment at face value, I let Pong Wars run while doing
   other things and came back a while later to discover the two balls
   locked in a vibratory loop (below left). That seemed odd, so I reloaded
   the page. The final state was exactly the same, so I closed the page
   and opened it again, starting a timer to see how long it would go.
   Indeed, 32 minutes in, it would always get stuck in the same way.

   I pinged Koen van Gilst on Mastodon about the need for an initial
   random seed, but my old friend Keith Dawson popped up a few minutes
   later with [5]suggested fixes. Since Pong Wars is open source and just
   a [6]single index.html file on Github, I copied it locally, made
   Keith's changes, and voila! Day and Night are more evenly matched in
   Keith's [7]modified version (above right), and although every
   run-through so far has eventually ended up in a vibratory loop, it's no
   longer predictable when it will happen.

   Who will port Pong Wars to the Vision Pro so the balls can bounce
   around your house? For now, I'd settle for a macOS screen saver.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://pong-wars.koenvangilst.nl/
   2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong
   3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)
   4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy
   5. https://tldr.nettime.org/@kdawson/111891568532340711
   6. https://github.com/vnglst/pong-wars
   7. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/02/pongwars.html

   Hidden links:
   8. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/02/Pong-Wars.png

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