{"id":101493,"date":"2024-06-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/01\/this-walking-app-let-me-whack-my-co-workers-with-a-baseball-bat\/"},"modified":"2024-06-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-01T12:00:00","slug":"this-walking-app-let-me-whack-my-co-workers-with-a-baseball-bat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/01\/this-walking-app-let-me-whack-my-co-workers-with-a-baseball-bat\/","title":{"rendered":"This walking app let me whack my co-workers with a baseball bat"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Violence is never the answer. That said, it was <\/em>fun when I opened a walking app and whacked a Verge<\/em> editor with a baseball bat and made another slip on a banana peel. After, I continued on my peaceful commute home. A bit later, one of my fellow writers walloped me not once but twice <\/em>with their own baseball bat. I wasn\u2019t actually mad, but it did prompt me to go on a walk around the block so I could hit them back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That, in a nutshell, is the appeal of Stompers<\/em> \u2014 an iOS app that encourages you to whack, trick, and out-walk your friends (or colleagues) in a Looney Tunes<\/em>-like race.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The app is the creation of designer Soren Iverson. You may know Iverson from his \u201cunhinged UI<\/a>\u201d design series, in which he posts conceptual app mock-ups for features that no one asked for but secretly want. For example, this Slack screenshot<\/a> of co-workers who message you on nationally mandated holidays getting a SWAT team called on them. In all of them, there\u2019s a thread of absurdist whimsy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was after I got whacked twice, so all\u2019s fair in love and stomping.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot: Stompers<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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That whimsy is in Stompers<\/em>, too. Some of that is the cartoony, meme-like art style. That, Iverson says, is intentional. The app\u2019s art is by Jim Soper<\/a>, who\u2019s done character designs for Looney Tunes<\/em> and The Cuphead Show<\/em>. Instead of using profile pictures, you create a Stomper avatar. (At The Verge<\/em>, a disproportionate number of us decided to have fuchsia skin.) There\u2019s also little section where you can see how many Danny DeVitos you\u2019ve walked in a day or how many steps you have left before you reach the Moon. Everything feels like an app circa 2015, but with a healthy dash of irony poisoning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It also wouldn\u2019t be an Iverson project if Stompers<\/em> wasn\u2019t twisted in some way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe work that I do is often about taking things and flipping them on their heads, or just questioning a core principle,\u201d Iverson tells The Verge<\/em>. \u201cWhat if step count could be messed with by someone else? It\u2019s really weird [because] it defeats the purpose in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The end result is sort of like Looney Tunes<\/em> meets Mario Kart<\/em>. As you \u201crace,\u201d you can pick up items to mess with your friends. You can send friends on a fake shortcut, halving their step counts for a 30-minute period. There are rockets that shoot you forward 1,000 steps you didn\u2019t actually take. The baseball bats knock you back 500 steps. The bananas have a 50 percent chance of knocking you back or propelling you forward 500 steps. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Just so everyone knows, I won on Tuesday.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot: Stompers<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As a fitness tech reviewer, futzing around with step counts is a fun thought experiment. I\u2019m guilty as anyone for getting too obsessed with metrics that don\u2019t really matter. Sometimes, I pout that my final step count in Stompers<\/em> doesn\u2019t reflect what I\u2019ve actually done in real life. But that\u2019s also challenged me to question why getting credit matters so much when I\u2019ve achieved my goal of being more active.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Iverson says the game\u2019s ultimate purpose is to connect with friends. It\u2019s not the same as catching up on a call, but it\u2019s a low-effort, easy way to check in. In the past week, I\u2019ve found that to be one of the game\u2019s charms. While pacing in my office over a troublesome draft, I laughed when a colleague DMed me to say, \u201cPlease, stop moving.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Stompers<\/em> is still new, having just launched last week. Even so, Iverson and his co-founder Josh Rozin already have big plans for the app going forward. Rozin told The Verge<\/em> that an Android version is in the works \u2014 much to the relief of the Android faithful on staff. He also noted that the team is discussing a potential single-player version of the game. Both demurred as to what the roadmap looks like beyond that, but Rozin says Stompers<\/em> has \u201chuge potential beyond fitness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whatever lies ahead, I\u2019ve enjoyed Stompers<\/em>\u2019 slightly bonkers approach to competition. Sometimes, I\u2019ll be rotting on the couch, doomscrolling TikTok, when I get a notification that someone has wronged my Stomper avatar. Occasionally, that will motivate me to go for a walk so I can get my revenge. Other times, I\u2019ll chuckle because joke\u2019s on them: I\u2019ve got a four-mile run planned for the next day. Either way, I\u2019m taking the steps \u2014 might as well have some low-stakes fun to go along with it. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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Violence is never the answer. That said, it was fun when I opened a walking app and whacked a Verge editor with a baseball bat and made another slip on a banana peel. After, I continued on my peaceful commute home. A bit later, one of my fellow writers walloped me not once but twice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101494,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-101493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}