Hard Lads

Testing masculinity.

A few years ago, some men got together and decided to whack each other with a chair among other very silly things. The resulting video went viral, and now Robert Yang has made a game about it: a sort of interactive YouTube clip that you can replay and replay in search of answers, much like the video itself.

You play as the cameraman (perhaps the least ‘hard’ of the group), and by clicking on-screen icons you can direct the men to smoke, to drink, to wield the chair and to kiss each other, all of which happened in the original video. You can then perform the actions yourself, by moving the mouse or analogue stick. You can make the smoking turn into a lung-clearing hacking up, by moving the analogue all the way, or you can transform that quick peck into a full-on snog.

Ultimately I got more from the original video – and Yang’s essay about it – than I did this game, but it’s a fascinating exercise in adding interactivity to a piece of found art.

It’s a bold idea, making a playable version of a YouTube video, that sort of works.