Ping Pong

What is Ping Pong?

Classic Pong, controlled by motion. Two kids stand side by side in front of the camera; each controls their paddle by moving up and down on their own half of the screen. The ball speeds up with every hit; first to 11 wins. Hard mode = faster starting ball and a higher max speed.

How to play Ping Pong

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks.
2. Two players, side by side, both facing the screen. A dashed line runs down the middle of the picture: that is the border between two separate halves, and each half drives the paddle on its own edge.
3. Find your paddle during the count-in. Both paddles are already live while the 3, 2, 1 counts down. Raise and lower one hand and watch which bar follows you — the green one on the left, or the pink one on the right. Yours is the one beside your own reflection.
4. Only up and down counts. The paddle goes to the height of whatever is moving most in your half, so stepping nearer the middle line, or further out towards the edge, changes nothing.
5. Rally. First to 11 wins, and the end screen names the side that took it. SPACE starts another game, H goes home, M turns the music off, F is fullscreen.

If the paddles and the ball appear but the room behind them does not, the camera never started. The camera help page checks that in one click; on many laptops the answer is a sliding cover over the lens.

What actually wins the point

Four things run this game, and only the first is obvious from watching it.

• Height is the only thing a paddle reads. It goes to the height of whatever is moving most in your half, matched one for one: a hand halfway up the picture puts the paddle halfway up the screen. You can see yourself, so line the paddle up against your own reflection rather than guess.
• Stop, and the paddle stays exactly where you left it — it never slides back to the middle. Park it on the line the ball is coming down and hold still. That beats chasing, because the paddle eases towards your hand rather than jumping to it: a whipped hand always arrives a moment before its paddle.
• Where the ball meets the paddle decides the angle. Dead centre and it leaves on the mirror image of the angle it arrived on. The top of the paddle shoves it upwards as well, the bottom shoves it down, and those shoves stack up over a rally — a long one ends with the ball climbing and diving steeply.
• The pace is something you build and then lose. Every return makes the ball about a twentieth faster, and it stops climbing a little under three times the speed it was served at, some twenty-two returns away. A point wipes all of it: the next serve leaves at the same gentle pace as the first of the game.

A fresh serve crosses the screen in about four seconds; a rally at the ceiling crosses it in under a second and a half. Hard serves about half as fast again with a ceiling to match, reached in roughly sixteen returns instead of twenty-two. The paddles are identical — only the ball changes.

Two players, one camera

The dashed line down the middle is not decoration. Everything left of it belongs to the left paddle and everything right of it to the right one, and the camera never asks who is who.

• Stand side by side, both fully in shot, and keep to your own side. A hand that strays over the line steers the other player's paddle, and that is the commonest way a rally falls apart.
• Each half follows whoever is moving most; it is not an average. A second child, a toddler crawling past, a dog, a curtain lifting behind you: anything in your half can take the paddle off you, and it flicks between you while it decides.
• How far back you stand sets how much of the paddle's travel you can reach. Close in, a small lift swings it top to bottom and everything feels twitchy. Several paces back, your whole reach only covers a band through the middle and the corners get hard to defend — which is a quiet way for an adult to handicap themselves against a small child.
• Enough light that a gentle movement still counts. In a dim room the paddle stops noticing small, slow movements and simply sits there.

Prop the laptop or tablet against something solid first: if the camera gets knocked, both paddles lurch somewhere random at once.

Playing it on your own

One person can start it, and the far paddle then does something useful: it only moves when something in its own half moves. Alone on one side, the other paddle sits where it began, halfway up its edge — a fixed block about a fifth of the screen tall.

That is a practice wall. Anything that reaches it comes back, angled by wherever on it the ball struck, so you can teach yourself what the top and the bottom of a paddle really do to a ball. Anything that misses it is a point to you, and the score still climbs to eleven.

The harder solo version: one hand in each half, both paddles at once, each hand staying on its own side of the line.

Before you start it on two children

This one has a score, and one of them loses — worth knowing before you hand it to two kids who are already tired.

• How long. There is no clock. A game ends when a side reaches eleven — a few minutes with beginners, longer once they can keep a rally alive.
• How loud. A blip on every hit, pitched differently for each paddle, so from the next room you can hear who is returning. A two-note chime on every point, and a chiptune loop under it. M turns the music off; the blips stay.
• How much room. Nobody travels and nobody jumps: two people inside the camera's view with their arms going up and down. It works sitting, as long as both chairs are in the picture.
• What it keeps. Nothing. No best score is saved, so there is no record to argue over afterwards.

It is listed from about five, and the reason is not coordination — a three-year-old can make a paddle move. It is that the game only works if each player can hold on to the idea that one half of the screen is theirs and the other is not.

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