Dish Washington
Developer: Team Five (From the Danish National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows (Half Life Two: Episode One mod)
Website
Description: Scrub those dirty dishes to the beat while your hot water still lasts. Turn up the heat by scrubbing to the beat, though cleaning off the beat will chill your water.
See The Color of Doom entry for help installing a mod.

Adam’s Thoughts:
It’s easy to become inured to the gradual stagnation of gaming. Good mechanics become tropes, rich tropes become genres, and the medium slouches toward a celebrated banality in the name of good design. Dish Washington isn’t going to shatter the gaming paradigm and renew innovation, but it is a little nudge that reminds you how much you take for granted.

Even if you’ve noticed that the rhythm genre is all about tapping a button at just the right time, you’ve probably never given any thought to what else you might do instead. Dish Washington ignores the implied assumption that tapping your foot is the only way to mark the beat, and instead asks you to do something more akin to conducting an orchestra: that is, making a rhythmic sweeping motion. The game’s dishwashing conceit is perhaps less auspicious than commanding an orchestra, but the core idea remains the same.

Dishwashing comes with some ancillary gameplay benefits that conducting would not. There are different stains on the dishes, each of which pulses in time with a different part of the music. The stains can only be scrubbed off during the split second that they pulse, which is where the rhythm game comes in. One might be synchopated, another infrequent, and another very rapid. You can just scrub one stain at a time while you’re learning, but it’s fun and challenging to figure out when and where to scrub so you can catch more than one stain with one motion. Adventure games may have invented screen scrubbing, but Dish Washington made it fun.

You also have to carefully stack the clean dishes so they don’t come crashing down. The dishes are in three stable stacks while they’re dirty, but you can only take dishes off the top to wash them, and simply inverting the stacks will turn your 32 piece china set into a 150 piece china set. It amounts to a Tower of Hanoi minigame that you complete between bouts of washing. You’re trying to finish the dishes before the water gets cold, to, so the pressure really starts mounting once you figure out how everything works.

For a simple game that can be played in about five minutes, Dish Washington has a surprising amount of depth and nuance. It’s not immediately obvious because there’s minimal tutorial instruction, but you get out of it what you put in. The game could stand to have more than one song, but this is a pretty good start.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Dish Washington is a charming and very unusual mod for Half Life. You play the eponymous Dish, a grooving green dinosaur stuck doing the dishes. You start with a large stack of dirty dishes, a tub of hot (but cooling) water, and a dish rack. Like in real life, your job is to take the dirty dishes, clean them in the water, and stack them in the dish rack to try so that they don’t fall over and break. Unlike the boring real life task, cleaning to the beat of the music is the key to success. The stains pulse to the beat of the music, and it’s your job only to scrub them as they dance. When you scrub the stains as they pulse, your funky beats heat up the dish water, while lacking rhythm times chills your tub. The game ends when you’re out of dishes or your tub gets icy cold. The temperature meter behaves like the lovechild of a timer and a health meter: you can both take damage and heal damage, but you’re fighting the second law of thermodynamics at the same time.

The game is charming but brief (a round is maybe five minutes). As the game only has one song, it’s probably a good thing it doesn’t last longer than it does. The game certainly would benefit from either a more diverse sound track, to increase replayability, or optimally the ability to throw your own music in and scrub to that, à la Audiosurf. Since the game currently lacks any reward aside from placement on a top ten list for success, a mechanic where you unlock new songs to clean to as you get better at the game would be a great feature to add.

The task of stacking up the dishes so they don’t collapse is exciting, because the dirty dishes are stacked not to fall (i.e. with the heavy stuff on the bottom). You can only take dirty dishes that are on one of the top of one of the three stacks to clean, but once you have clean dishes, you can move them around the dish rack. This makes it easier to stack up new dishes, but while you move them around, you aren’t cleaning new dishes, and therefore not fighting the cooling of your water. Dishes crashing to the floor costs you points, but not heat in your tub: if your goal is just to get through the stack of dirty dishes, you can let them wobble and fall all you like.

It’s neat to see the Half Life engine used to make a rhythm game, because it emphasizes the utility of the code. It also took some creativity on the part of the students to use a first-perspective and use it to create a rhythm game. The game may be short, but it’s friendly, sticks to it’s theme, and is fun to play.

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