Cry Havok

“Cry Havok” is a fun game you can play if you have friends, roommates, etc. who play video games while you are in the room or who are often around when you are playing games. The only prerequisite is having played enough games to recognize the presence of the Havok Physics Engine, the most frequently licensed physics middleware in modern video gaming.

If you haven’t trained yourself to recognize Havok already, think back to interactions with movable objects in Halo 3, Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, or Dead Space. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a particular feeling that games running Havok have that is inescapable. It’s also spectacularly popular, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a game whose physics modeling will instantly explain to you what I’m talking about.

Anyway, once you can easily identify Havok at work, “Cry Havok” is just a race to see, when starting a new game that has licensed this wonderful piece of software, who can first identify a blatantly obvious event where Havok’s exact gravitational model and frictional coefficients caused something hilarious and/or awesome to happen. At that point, you have to declare your victory— “We’ve got Havok!” is my personal favorite— at which point anyone else present can contest whether or not you’ve “spotted the middleware.” If you win, you get a point (which means absolutely nothing).

For bonus fun, feel free to build a big red button that can sit on your coffee table that will set off some sort of klaxon above your TV set. Whoever gets the point for a new game gets to press the button, which will hopefully make metal walls descend over all windows and doors in your apartment while your homemade alarm rings and rings. Maybe you can make it let some dogs loose or something. It’s a literary reference, and you only live once, you know?

—Casey