A Tiny Game of Control

I can’t embed custom JavaScript still … so please come here to try this game. Note that it needs some old-fashioned pointing device (mouse or trackpad) to function at the moment. Touchscreens work but the code isn’t optimised.

https://sifyrena.github.io/Control/

The game was my first attempt to work with GPT5. I am not totally ignorant of coding small loop toys in JS, but the previous project was late 2023 and I am pretty impressed to report that the bot basically came up with a buildable foundation based on my UI sketch and text description with one shot…

I have had this idea for a few years, but only in recovering from slowness of the body and my life did I see its value. It first came up in a conversation with a Freundin, where I was soothing her that sometimes the best control we have over something is its second time derivative. And such.

This game is a first-order approximation of that picture (pun intended).

Sometimes motivation (y) is direct, other times you can only push its rate-of-change (y’) or even its acceleration (y”).

Push too hard, and you overshoot.

(Well in real life hopefully sometimes there’s damping too…)

The music loop is an extremely early version of Iridium Point “Paris” — it sounded too bright and happy so this was a fitting use case. Since I host it here you can also stream …