Anomalous Coffee Machine
New
- Genre Educational games
- Players 1
- Session 5 min
- Price Free
- Updated
A single machine with a keyboard attached and no goal whatsoever. You type a word — an object, a feeling, an abstraction, a name — and the machine produces something in response, usually unsettling and occasionally very funny. There are several hundred written outcomes underneath it, which means the game is really a vocabulary test disguised as a vending machine. What makes it hold attention is that the responses are authored rather than generated, so finding one feels like finding something somebody hid. Typing an obvious word gives an obvious result; typing something nobody would think to try is where the writing is. It has no score, no progression and no fail state, and it does not need them: the whole loop is thinking of a word, wondering what it will do, and being wrong about that in an interesting way.
| Keyboard | Type a word into the machine |
|---|---|
| Enter | Dispense |
| Mouse or touch | Interact with what comes out |
How to play Anomalous Coffee Machine
- Start with concrete objects to see how the machine reads plain input.
- Move on to abstractions — emotions, concepts, states — which is where the written responses live.
- Try proper nouns and names; several of them have specific answers.
- Read what comes out rather than immediately typing again. The detail is the content.
- Keep a list of words that produced nothing, then come back with variations on them.
Tips
- Single words work better than phrases, because the machine matches on terms rather than parsing sentences.
- Plurals and tenses sometimes give different results from the root word, which is worth testing.
- The more specific the word, the more likely someone wrote a bespoke answer for it.
Questions about Anomalous Coffee Machine
Is there an objective?
None. It is an experiment toy with a large body of written responses.
How many outcomes are there?
Several hundred, written rather than generated.
Can I lose?
No, nothing in it can fail.
Does it need a keyboard?
Yes, typing is the entire input.
How long is it?
As long as you keep thinking of words, which is usually longer than expected.
Does it need installing?
No, it runs in the browser.
