Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play(simonwillison.net) |
Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play(simonwillison.net) |
I don't think that could be prevented, either. You could have the protocol exchange signing keys at the start and sign every message, but it's stretching the amount you can do with available audio bandwidth already so I expect that either wouldn't work or would become unbearably slow.
I wonder if the game state could be sent in an analog/continuous encoding rather than as encoding of a digital state. So that the human player could learn to roughly interpret the sounds, or at least figure out that the sounds are correlated with what’s happening.
That might have a different, possibly satisfying feel compared to the current bloops.
State would not be reconstructed bit-perfect but for a model of a physical system like pong, approximate might be ok.
Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!
Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong
Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code.
Tags: game-design, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude-code
Here's the Chirp Pong code: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/chirp-pong.html
(It's pretty loud and annoying, so sitting next to someone having your phones chirp at each other would be more of a social commentary than anything else.)
You've just added a nontrivial amount of memory usage as well that will look a lot like a memory leak as it grows.
you'll end up being protected from overflow for a practically-forever length of time with fairly few bits as long as the game isn't polling extremely fast.
it's not foolproof, and it's to thwart a kid, so ehh i'm not that into it.