I Accidentally Made It Too Serious

Last Sunday I put Oval Arcade on the internet.

Then I spent the week screwing with it.

I also said I was going to keep this to five to ten hours a week. That lasted approximately zero weeks.

The bigger problem: Oval Arcade was getting too serious.

Most first clicks opened sourced material. Worse, I had accidentally developed a formula:

Story → joke → movie clip.

After a couple of flags, you could pretty much predict how the room worked.

That sucks.

The reaction I want isn't:

“I wonder what information is behind this object.”

It's:

“What the hell is THIS going to do?”

Making Things Weirder

I'm not just randomizing everything. That would become another formula.

Some objects should be random. Some should follow a sequence. Some should remember what you did. Some should hide something several clicks deep. And some should be completely pointless.

Some things stayed serious on purpose. Lincoln still does.

The fighter jets, the submarine, and the B-2 now behave very differently than they did before. They're mostly short, stupid sounds and movie clips, with a few much bigger things buried underneath.

I'll give away one: somewhere in the B-2 is Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb.

The Happy Meal and the Diet Coke got the same general treatment.

I'm not telling you what else they do.

The Arcade Cabinet

This one happened entirely this week.

I was thinking about the name Oval Arcade and realized the Oval Office should have an actual arcade cabinet in it.

So I worked with ChatGPT and Photoshop to make one and add it to the master image.

Then I thought: why shouldn't the games actually work?

I described three ridiculous little games to Cursor, and that same afternoon I was playing them in the browser.

They're small and stupid and exactly what they should be. They're also a completely different kind of interaction from anything else in the room. Instead of clicking something to see what happens, you can stop exploring the Oval Office and actually play for a while.

This is one of the things about AI that I still find kind of amazing. An absurd idea can go from “wouldn't it be funny if...” to actually working ridiculously quickly.

At the beginning of the week, there wasn't an arcade cabinet.

Now there is one with three functioning video games.

The Serious Stuff Didn't Leave

It got deeper in a few places.

The Declaration of Independence now leads to a much larger First Amendment comparison. The Cabinet overlay was rebuilt. Washington got a substantial new section, along with a lot of source cleanup throughout the site.

There was also plenty of less interesting but necessary work: rebuilding overlays, fixing hitboxes, cropping and timing video clips, adding consistent movie credits, and adjusting the Oval Office image. The tiny things that become obvious only after you put a site in front of actual people.

This Is Closer

I think I understand the balance better now.

Oval Arcade isn't an interactive encyclopedia with jokes in it.

It's a comedy environment that happens to contain serious, sourced information.

The room should reward curiosity. It should reward clicking something twice. It should occasionally reward clicking something seven times for absolutely no defensible reason.

And now, apparently, it should occasionally let you stop everything and play a video game.

I think it's better now.