Peter Gyory, a game designer who is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s ATLAS Institute spent his COVID-19 lockdown created his very own games console out of cardboard. His Tinycade, which he created with colleagues at ATLAS allows anyone, anywhere to make a working arcade machine that can fit on a kitchen table or even a TV tray. All you need are a smartphone, some cardboard, two small mirrors and bric-a-brac like rubber bands and toothpicks. In other words: junk. “I was really frustrated that I couldn’t make games,” said Gyory, a doctoral student at CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute. “I realised I was surrounded by cardboard. I thought: ‘How could I make a game out of that?” Explaining the limitations he put on his project, Gyory adds: “The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn’t go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn’t use it in Tinycade.” He then presented his team’s invention in June at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Creativity & Cognition in Venice, Italy. Gyory and his colleagues still need to work through some kinks, but he invites interested gamers to connect to beta test the platform. Currently, he’s developing a series of initial games for Tinycade. They include Claw, a spin on the arcade classic game Space Invaders, and De Volta, a game that’s like “playing golf with a spaceship” that he designed with Enric Llagostera at Concordia University in Canada. The team, however, hopes that one day the platform will allow players to come up with their own, never-before-seen ways for humans to immerse themselves in the digital world “When Peter and I go to conferences, he would show off all these different kinds of games: games where you’re riding a horse, fighting on a pirate ship,” said Ellen Do, one of the team members behind Tinycade and a professor at ATLAS and the Department of Computer Science. “Why should you have to use a standard keyboard interface for all of those games?”