Tug-Of-War

A concept I had for an interactive experience is a reenactment of a tug-of-war. An unpleasant experience that I myself has had as a child is when competing in a tug-of-war the other team lets go of the rope resulting in you and all of your team falling over in surprise on top of one another.

There is the feeling of pulling a rope and feeling it resist your pull; and the feeling of pulling a rope too hard and feeling the rope release at the other end resulting in your fall.

I wanted to create an object that allowed you to feel these two sensations of when the rope is tight and slack.

Firstly I thought this could be done using a large wall with a hole in it. Through this hole the rope is threaded. A peg is threaded through the rope on the hidden side, this prevents the rope from being pulled furthur. Randomly the peg would be removed, the next pull on the rope would result in the user falling over.

A model could be made of this using smaller materials to test it out.

Another idea is that there are three ropes, each with a different length of slack rope, if you pulled each rope as hard as you can, the shortest one would pull back against you, the longest one would be too long and so you would fall over, and one would be in between.

Again, these would need to be tested.