Would you play Speedgate?

Did you ever invent new games as a child? For sure. I remember, for example, "ponyball", where we played a kind of football, where we hit the tennis ball with the front wheel of a Pony, a bike that more or less all of us had at the time. And "frisbiball", where we played a combination of handball and basketball, only with a frisbee. All these games seemed incredibly interesting to us at the time, but then we kind of outgrew them and forgot about them.

But times are changing, and now games are apparently no longer invented only by mularia, but are also created in a different way. At the American advertising agency AKQA, for example, they asked an artificial intelligence system for "advice". They first entered data on over 400 different sports, and then ordered the system to invent something new based on this data. The system began to "vomit" answers, most of which were not exactly heads and tails, but with a little "selection and interpretation" something came to be called Speedgate.

Kathryn Webb, one of the participants in the project, said: "Our team of creatives spent most of the time looking at a large electronic spreadsheet and tried to find something from it that would be understandable and interesting in practice." Which was not exactly a simple task, because the "proposals" were quite unusual and required a lot of imagination to understand. They read something similar to: "jumping a ball saw on a horse with handles, two parallel, lying down, fastest, high", which the team translated as "sawing on a horse with handles", where "two competitors sit on their own horse with handles, which are placed at each end of the trunk and swing back and forth with a saw in their hand*". This would definitely be fun to see, but as a sport... But after about 1000 weird combinations, they just came across something promising, refined the idea and Speedgate was born.

Speedgate is played by two teams of six competitors. Players pass the ball, similar to rugby, to their teammates with their hand or foot, but they must not run with it. The goal is to pass the ball through the center goal and then through the opponent's goal. If the team manages to do both, they get two points, but if a player passes the ball to a teammate through the goal, who immediately returns it back to the same player, the team gets three points. And what is this door? Two sticks stuck in the ground. These are just the basic rules, but there are quite a few more. One of them is, for example, that if a team claims to have scored a goal, but it was not true, the opposing team gets points.

But the game on paper is one thing, but its implementation in practice is something completely different. That's why AKQA also tested the cannon. They have been playing Speedgate for several Saturdays in a row, and they have invited local students, high school students, children, parents to participate, and they all seem to love the game. If you are interested in more detailed Speedgate rules, click on the infographic at the end of the news.

Source: AKQA

AI translated