All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
I'm standing in my bathroom, carefully unrolling eight sheets of toilet paper, because an app told me to.
"Where are you?" the game, a free iPhone and iPad app called Tiny Games, had demanded. A variety of options appeared, and I'd been honest and tapped the button labeled "bedroom."
"How are you feeling?" Tiny Games inquired. It presented four options, including "excited" and "nervous." I chose the latter, and Tiny Games immediately responded with a suggestion for a game that involved using a length of toilet paper as a delicate jump rope. The goal was to take care not to break it, shortening it by one length after each successful pass over your body.
Back in my bathroom, with pieces of toilet paper on my head, I'm laughing uncontrollably. I'm happy. I feel good.
Toilet Paper Jumprope – of which I am now a pro-level player, thank you – is one of more than 200 diversions in the Tiny Games collection, along with endless variations on those games depending on how many players you have. It is by no means the silliest or funniest game in the app.
After asking basic questions about your location and party size, Tiny Games randomly prompts you with one of these games, most of which involve very little use of the phone once the rules have been divulged.
One single-player game challenged me to select any object in my bedroom and ponder how long it had been there. After a series of increasingly specific questions, it challenged me to find "the two touching objects in the room that have been in here for the MOST DIFFERENT lengths of time." In my room, the two objects were the carpet and a pair of socks I'd just tossed onto the floor.
London-based developer Hide&Seek, creator of Tiny Games, has been designing and consulting on game projects since about 2007. It has published videogames, but specializes in out-of-the-box, non-digital designs like Boardgame Remix Kit, which creates 27 games using board games everyone owns, like Monopoly or Scrabble.
Hide&Seek's president Margaret Robertson says it always has been her company's goal to make games that bring out your inner child.
"One of the strange things that happened with play over the past century is that it got really relegated to childhood," Robertson told WIRED. "Adults used to play a lot more at home and when they went out, and I think [we] lost a huge amount when we started to lose the more common practice of pub games and parlor games."
Robertson wants to put play back into adults' lives. "I think it's great to put people back in touch with that part of their lives," she says. "So by making you jump rope with toilet paper, which is obviously ridiculous, there is a kind of serious agenda there, where we really do think that play is important and nourishing for grown-ups."
The Hide&Seek team, which funded Tiny Games with help from Kickstarter, hired other designers of quirky games to pitch ideas.
Ricky Haggett, designer of the upcoming PlayStation 4 game Hohokum, contributed a game involving refrigerator magnets that could take months to play. At the beginning of the game, players choose the direction they want the magnet to face (up, down, left, right). Any time the magnet is facing your direction, you're "winning." If you get caught by another player while changing the direction the magnet is facing, you're out.
A game by Bennett Foddy, designer of QWOP proves how much fun can come from a simple idea. His game is called "This is Your Laugh." To play, one player turns to another, says "this is your laugh," and then does their best impression of that person's laugh. The players take turns doing their imitations until someone actually laughs, and that person loses.
"It's up to you how accurate you want to make that laugh," Robertson says. "Friendships have come near to breaking because of this game."
