#024 - Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?

Release Date: August, 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

While he's called "Dave of the Caves," the Caves games aren't the only games Dave Kaufman produced for People's Computer Company during his tenure with them. Here, we have a strange little puzzle game, Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? I'm going to call it Button for the majority of the article for brevity's sake.

Some corrections need to be made on the release date provided by MobyGames. It says it was released in September '73, but the game's own source code, provided in PCC Games, lists August '73 as the date instead. Button doesn't appear in the September '73 issue of the PCC newsletter, so I'm content to stick with what the source code says. As a rule, I go with the earliest date I find, unless there's compelling evidence to the contrary.

Evidence of Button's August 1973 date, courtesy again of PCC Games (1974.)

Once again, Button is made available on the Internet Archive. The actual gameplay concept of Button is kind of bizarre, in my opinion. It seems reminiscent of those social deduction games you'd play as kids. One person (you) sits in the middle of a circle of seven other people. One of the people in the circle has a button, and it's the centre person's (your) job to guess who has the button. Kind of weird to try this as a text-based game concept, seeing as a lot of what would make a game like this interesting is picking up on visual clues, like body language.

There's only a couple of rules that mix things up a little. If your guess is the neighbour of the person who has the button, they will pass off the button to someone else. If you then guess the previous holder of the button, then the person who had the button that turn will pass it off. So there's a little bit of logic in determining who likely has the button in those instances. You could also just guess the person outright at random. It happens more often than you'd think. One in seven chance.

The rules.

Or, only on very special occasions, the button will just disappear. I had this happen to me once, oddly when I was playing the modern version of the Archive port. Yes - I did play the modern version, purely so I could read all of the instructions. I started to go mad when this occurred, questioning people that didn't exist within the game, seeing as the people who were there all said they didn't have the button.

Colour and madness. Question everything.

I also had a different glitch occur in the classic version of the game. Sometimes, seemingly at random, the game would decide that it didn't like the current round I was playing and decided to give me a new one instead. Normally you'd have to type in a zero to get this to happen, but sometimes the game did it on its own.

Apparently the game didn't like what I was doing in this round.

It's oddly fun to talk about bugs in these games. I suppose it might be because there's been so few that when one (or two, in this case) does appear, it's like a special event to commemorate. It also provides opportunities for jokes, which I will always gladly take.

I've been experimenting with my work process somewhat, which resulted in me playing this a lot more than I probably needed to. As a result, I'm fairly content with the scores I've given Button. There's not much else to say about the game, so let's get into it.

Time Played: 15 minutes

Rounds are very quick - you can probably get through several per minute.

Difficulty: 1 (Brain-dead)

Having only a 1 in 7 chance to guess the button holder means that there's little in the way of challenge present here. Even when the button moves, it's very simple to figure out where it could've gone.

Gameplay: 2

While yes, there is some very basic logical reasoning to be had when the button moves, there is little else compelling about Button. The whole point of a game like this in my mind is reading social cues and body language, which you obviously can't do here. The word that come to mind when I was writing my notes was dumb. This game is just dumb.

Controls: 5

Standard

Visual: 6

I'm going to be generous here. Button does have pretty good formatting for 1973 standards. The clues are presented as if the people in the circle are speaking to you, which is a respectable attempt at livening up the game.

Functionality: 3

I came across a couple of game-breaking bugs, as mentioned earlier. The button can disappear for the circle, resulting in a soft-lock, or the game can randomly decide to start a new round in the middle of the current round.

Accessibility: 3

Probably just going to leave it as standard for text-based games.

Fun Factor: 1

It's dumb and it's lame. I don't know why I played it as much as I did.

So that's a poor result for Button - a score of 20, earning placement in the E-tier as the 29th overall game, after beating out Roulette on tiebreaker rules.

We're done with Dave of the Caves' contributions for a little while now. He'll be back later on. Next up, we're revisiting the Mugwump game format with Snark.

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