Mysterious comic strip

Marble games have always fascinated me since a Sesame Street clip I loved 50 years ago.

Yesterday when I was feeling poorly after a medical procedure, I discovered this interactive xkcd comic.

https://xkcd.com/2916

At first I was like, how is this a comic?

If you click on “View Machine” in the bottom left corner, and then pan around, it seems endless. I have no idea how big it is. It’s like a digital marble game. With cats?

I still didn’t get it. I thought the comic was clever in that we can only look at a little bit of it at a time. A metaphor for life. It is intriguing to look at. But not being a gamer, I didn’t initially realize it was interactive.

Until I noticed the little “edit” button in the lower left. It appears you can create your own marble game!

The tools are on the top right in edit mode. I clicked on the tool set and clicked on a brick. The brick positioned itself in the middle of the game, and now the balls bounce off the brick. Lol.

Here’s another I started, that doesn’t do much either. You can choose a variety of tools, move them, and turn them around. I’m not sure why one of my games has yellow balls coming from the top center, and one has green and red balls coming from elsewhere.

OMG this is fascinating. Here’s a screenshot of a new one I’m making.

You might ask yourself, how did those blue balls end up in the middle of nowhere in the top half of this game? Well, those two long baskets that slightly overlap will sometimes collect balls on their handles and then toss them upwards when the baskets dump. I took the screenshot right when they bounced.

I’m figuring out that the goal is to get the balls fed back out of the game through the exit gears (which look the same as the entrance gears except they’re turning the opposite way and there’s a little triangle arrow). If the balls sit around too long without going anywhere, they disappear. Oh no, my balls are dying!

I’m getting some balls fed out the gears, but I’m still not getting any of my red X’s to turn into green checkmarks.

Ah-ha! I finally figured it out. The colored balls are supposed to go out the gear with the triangle colored to match. Blue balls go out blue triangle gears, yellow balls go out yellow triangle gears. That’s simple enough. I’m not getting any points for putting yellow balls out the blue ball gear. Those of you who are gamers (Callan, Guen) are laughing at me right now. Yeah, I’m a beyond-newbie.

Yay, two green checkmarks. But how am I supposed to get those yellow balls, that are coming out so low on the right hand side, up to their exit on the left? I will have to defy gravity. That’s what those swinging baskets are for. I will have to figure out how they work.

It appears that readers who create their own working game can submit it. Maybe the submissions get added to the entire thing you see when you click on “View Machine”. In which case, no wonder it seems crazy and endless. And that might be why the different games I started have different colored balls coming from different locations. That might be how it inserts into the bigger game. Like puzzle pieces, there are probably a set number of tiles configured in standard ways along the edges, and we can do what we want within the tile. This is very cool.

I still don’t understand the cats though. My toolbox has no cats. Maybe when I get better I get cats?

My friends all do Wordle. Maybe I should create marble game tiles.

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals