“Mirror time” – EyeToy: Play

**Eye Toy: Play** (London Studios/Sony, PlayStation 2, 2003)

It’s a familiar routine now. I turn on the software, and I see myself, framed in a rectangle within. The space of the room I’m in is simplified to one narrow slice, and that slice hides details just out of view. I sit at the cluttered kitchen table and rotate the camera until lined up just right, #1 games collection out of view to one side, Hello Kitty out of view to the other, my body doing the final bit of framing work and blocking the Hey Duggee plushie behind me, a combined living room and toddler’s playroom turned into an office of sorts. I make a final effort to order my overgrown hair and, adjustments completed, I press start.

After a year of pandemic-induced working from home, days filled with remote meetings, I can think of nothing else when I turn on EyeToy: Play, the game by London Studios which launched in 2003 with Sony’s new PlayStation 2 webcam peripheral. Starting things off standing up and having a head-and-shoulders outline to fit myself into are novelties. But framing myself on screen and checking out how I will appear isn’t a novelty at all. Submitting my movements to the gaze of a little camera is redolent of work before it’s a game.

In 2003, things were rather different. Webcams were still something bought by a select few, rather than built into laptops and a widespread part of work life for many. Meanwhile, the PS2’s already massive user base (like the ZX Spectrum and PC before it) offered an opportunity to try out new approaches to games that might reach a different, wider population than games like The Getaway, by one of the developers merged to form London Studios. The console’s USB ports meant peripherals were one obvious route to go. Buzz!, Guitar Hero and (my personal favourite) Singstar would all follow, but the EyeToy camera and EyeToy: Play got there earlier. It hit enough immediate success for the game to spend five weeks at the top of the UK charts in Summer 2003, though the failure of any of its follow-ups to reach the same position tells a story too.

Once set up in position on screen, the game asks you to wave your hand across icons on the screen to control the menu. Compared to pressing buttons on the controller, it’s rather inefficient, but that’s not the point. With controllers having gained more different buttons and sticks with each generational advance, they were an increasingly complex instrument and off-putting to newcomers, something like handing them a clarinet and expecting a tune on it right away. The back of EyeToy: Play’s box, with its children and grannies, sends a message that its alternative to controllers is something that can be picked up by anyone. Plus gestural control took things to an extra level above the novelty of just appearing on screen, and with Minority Report having come out just the previous year it was a tiny bit of science fiction come to life early. At least as long as you didn’t have, say, a lightbulb in shot near one of the menu options to throw off the detection.

One unexpected aspect of enforced home working is that I find videoconferencing so much more to my liking than most in-person meetings that I spend less of my day mentally recovering from meetings than in the before times. Meetings with people I don’t already know well have long been somewhat of an ordeal because of my social anxiety, but it turns out that a not insignificant proportion of that is the terror of occupying space together. I’ve been clumsy and uncoordinated for as long as I can remember, and walking into a room with someone is just the kind of thing to remind me of it. On some level I always still feel like the youngest kid in my primary school class, doing advanced maths while completely failing to tie my shoelaces or whatever stage everyone else had moved up to. Sitting down in front of a screen to talk to someone through our little windows into our rooms, a lot of concerns about my own physical awkwardness dissipate. And while there’s always a reminder on screen of my own presence, an ever present mirror, it’s contained within my carefully set up frame, a reassuring bit of added information.

EyeToy: Play doesn’t give you the chance to sit still, since it is based on moving around to make your on-screen reflection interact with different objects across a wide selection of mini-games. They’re all introduced with forced jollity by its set of ugly blobby 3D characters, whose 2D representations on the box include a trio with a rather brazen resemblance to Jamie Hewlett’s art for pop group Gorillaz. I guess that’s telling of a combo of cool and accessibility London Studios were aspiring to, and they didn’t miss completely on the second at least.

The games have you doing things like spinning plates, triggering fireworks and keeping a football up in the air, all by moving your body around in view of the camera. They show a fair appreciation of a lesson which I will come back to when we get to later games with similar types of control schemes: that precision is besides the point at best. I enjoyed flailing around to get plates spinning and sparkling, with little understanding of what was even happening on screen, detail of my movements forgotten.

The other thing that EyeToy: Play does is to focus on the things that its system can sense moderately well and make best use of those. Konami’s Para Para Paradise arcade machine had set a useful precedent, replacing Dance Dance Revolution’s physical controls with a set of five infrared sensors that could detect if your hand (or miscellaneous body part) was in position under them. Giving you a small set of fixed positions to place your hand in is about EyeToy’s level too, and setting that to music follows naturally. So there is the Simon Says of the Boogie mini-game, where you follow the lead of a character to gesture to two different spots in time with the beat, and Beat Freak more directly imitating Konami’s dance games. The selection of music is tiny by comparison, but including the expressive groove of Moloko’s “Sing It Back” does help its appeal to last a while.

And then there’s Mirror Time. Mirror Time also involves touching icons in one of the four corners of the screen, but doesn’t have the player do it in time with music. It has other complications. In those four corners there are the icons you are meant to touch within a short time, but sometimes there are also cartoon bombs which you are meant to avoid. And after every round of reaching for the corners, the screen flips, reflecting your image vertically or horizontally, or both. It becomes very easy to reach in the wrong direction and set off a bomb. The simple task suddenly becomes a lot more taxing and counterintuitive.

Hostile reversed controls are almost as old of an idea in video games as Simon Says. There is a memorable through-the-looking-glass sequence in Magicland Dizzy where I first encountered them, and I know that was a long way from the first use. Yet the execution of this idea in Mirror Time, adding the element of misleading visual feedback on my own movements, made it feel startlingly new, even playing it two decades later. Out of necessity my every movement became tentative, thoughtful, strategic.

It’s also a game which felt to me a little like in-person meetings always used to feel, every movement a potential losing move. Taking my familiar state of heightened, uncomfortable awareness and magnifying it within an entertaining game was a fascinating experience. The stakes were both higher and much, much lower. The goals were clearer than any social interaction, if challenging. And of course I was awkward and unco-ordinated; I was in mirror world, after all. It was rather freeing.

One of my strategies to help my performance was to take the big Hello Kitty plushie that I move out of my work calls and place it firmly in shot, an additional distinguishing feature to mark my right hand side, wherever it ended up on screen. A way of reasserting reality in the mirror world. It helped, although the tight time limits left little chance to think. And after a year of flattening my world into a static frame on a screen, there was something extra joyful about using movement and objects within my full real world space to take on EyeToy: Play‘s challenges. It might have reminded me of work calls, but taking that familiar flatness and flipping and playing with it transformed the experience.