Plug & Play (video game)

Players use point and click or touchscreen controls to interact and rearrange a series of characters represented as plugs. To make the characters interact, players manipulate, couple and uncouple their wires or plugs.^[1] Many of the interactions between the figures involve resolving humorous or unusual conflicts between the figures, whose plugs and sockets connect with the player's intervention.^[2][1]

Plug & Play was a collaboration between Swiss director and animator Michael Frei and designer and programmer Mario von Rickenbach.^[3] The game was originally an short film animated by Frei, which premiered in February 2013.^[3][4] Due to minimal funds and frequent travel, Frei developed the visual style for the animation using the touchpad on his laptop, which he would later employ for the game.^[5][6] He stated the concept was about "[building] tension through contrast and opposition" through exploring a "binary world of female and male plugs".^[5] Frei later approached von Rickenbach, a game design graduate at the Zurich University of the Arts, seeking to "reach a different audience" by translating the film into an interactive game.^[3] The game's visuals were drawn by Frei in Photoshop and programmed by von Rickenbach in Unity.^[4] Development occurred over two years, with the process involving a mixture of two- and three-dimensional animation techniques. To achieve this, the developers reconstructed of the film's animations from 12 to 60-second frames, and merged them with "digital puppet" models in the Unity engine to provide the figures with physics. ^[6] Frei and von Rickenbach would continue to collaborate on a second title, Kids, in 2019.^[7]