Playmation

Advanced toy R&D · Sensor-driven physical play · Gesture systems & story tooling

I was part of the earliest R&D team on what became Playmation. We were a handful of people in a windowless room, trying to figure out whether a story you play with your whole body, with no screen anywhere, could actually work. We iterated through multiple versions of the experience and playtested constantly. By the time it shipped as a national retail product under the Marvel Avengers brand, I had owned two of its core systems end to end.

First, I owned the gesture recognition stack. This included designing every gesture in the vocabulary, building the recognition functionality, designing the experiences on top of it, and specifying the hardware and software underneath it.

Kids are such insane input sources. They come in a wide variety of sizes and would flail wildly even in artificial playtests with strange adults in the room. They aim wrong and expect the story to keep up with their own imagination. The toy had to make “close enough” feel like “nailed it,” because a toy confidently reading a punch as diving behind the couch could send the story off in a branch the kid didn’t choose.

Second, I built an authoring language for story moments the kids play with their body. The systemic game (battles, sneaking, procedural play) could carry moment-to-moment fun, but systems alone can’t always sell a story beat. Writers needed a way to say now THIS happens, and the player does THAT, in this window. This tool enabled scripted set-pieces with branching logical gates for a game with no screen.

If you’ve ever been in a theme-park stunt show and the performer turns to the crowd and yells “everybody duck! NOW!” and everybody ducks and the story responds, that’s the mechanic. The whole product was an interactive radio play, and these were its quicktime events. One of the writers on the team started calling it BenScript. I didn’t name it, but I also didn’t protest.

Periodically I would also lead tiger teams tasked with building working demos on short notice for executives and business partners. Sometimes the product had to be convincing this week. It’s a different discipline from production engineering.

Playmation shipped nationally and sold at every major retailer.