Hit The Decks: Record Tripping

This is rather awesome. A webgame called Record Tripping. The game is controlled with your mousewheel, which acts as a means of record scratching. Beginning with a record player, then expanding the idea into increasingly obscured scenarios, you control the playing of a passage from Alice In Wonderland. Scroll up to scratch forward, back to to go backward. Then holding down the left mouse button will slow the record down. There's a background track for each of the five chapters, and three difficulty levels for each chapter.

Created by Bell Brothers, it's hard to learn much about Dan and John from their site. Other than to learn what they're tweeting, listening to, and renting from Netflix. But clearly there's some real design smarts going on here.

The game is absolutely beautiful, and densely detailed. The load time is enough to tip you off to this. And while brief, the imagination on display is truly impressive. It doesn't worry that it needs to tell you what to do, instead letting you use your common sense in each situation. I really would like a lot more of it.

More than anything it Record Tripping reminds me of Negativland. The British voice reading the story, perhaps. Digging around it seems to be one Davina Porter, who appears to make her living reading audio books. Her clipped, well-enunciated English reminds me most of the beginning of The ABCs of Anarchism. Add in the scratchy noise and the connection was made. But maybe that's just me. Although here the Brothers have put links to let people buy the tracks they've used. So not that Negativland...

It's smart, and silly, which makes for an excellent combination. Cheers to Rachel for the nudge.