Pong
Two paddles, one ball, first to eleven. Pong is played live: both of you at the court at once, in a single sitting, over a connection that can carry a game fifty times a second. Move your finger or your pointer across your half of the court and the paddle follows.
Live, and what that needs
- Unlike every other game here, Pong is not played by turns. The ball is moving from the moment it is served and both paddles are live at once, so both players have to be at the court at the same time.
- The page needs a WebSocket. If your browser or your network cannot open one, the page says so and there is no other way to play; a game you cannot move is worse than a plain sentence.
- If you drop off for half a second the bot covers your paddle until you are back, and nothing is held against you. Walk away for two whole points and you forfeit, as a player who runs out of time forfeits in any other game.
The rules
- The ball is served from the centre toward the player who lost the last point, at an angle the seed picks. It is held there for a second first, so you can see where it is going.
- Your paddle has eight segments. The ball comes back at an angle that depends on which one it hits: the two middle segments return it nearly square, the two outer ones at the sharpest angle. That is the whole of the aiming.
- The ball speeds up the longer a rally lasts, one step every four hits, up to a cap; a miss puts it back to the slowest speed for the next serve.
- The paddles reach the walls. On the original cabinet they stopped short of the top of the screen, a defect in the circuit its maker kept for the difficulty; here a ball can always be reached, and a point is a paddle that was not there.
- The paddles move at a fixed speed, twenty-four court units a tick, which crosses the court in well under a second. A ball you have read right can always be reached; one you misjudged, or reacted to late, cannot.
How a game ends
- The first player to eleven points wins. Eleven, flat: there is no two-point margin, because the game this copies had none.
- A resignation ends the game against that player.
- The deadline on the page is not a move timer, since there are no moves: it is a dead man's switch. If no point has been scored for five minutes, because the game itself stopped, the game is abandoned and nobody is rated. Nobody loses a game of Pong for thinking.
Worth knowing before you start
- A paddle that knows where the ball will cross reaches every ball. Points are won by making the other player misjudge: the outer segments send the ball sharpest, and a sharp ball that bounces off a side wall arrives from where it was not expected. Hit with the edge of your paddle on purpose.
- The ball speeds up as the rally goes on, and a fast sharp ball leaves less time to read it. Long rallies end in mistakes, not in unreachable balls.
- The bot misjudges the ball a little at the top level and more at the lower ones. It never tires and never loses sight of the ball, so beat it by reading it: it aims its returns away from where you are.
- On a phone hold it upright: your paddle is across the bottom and your thumb moves it left and right. On a desk the court lies on its side and the pointer moves up and down.
The seed decides every serve, and the arbiter runs the ball on the server from both players' paddle inputs; both are stored with each point and published when the game ends, so a match can be re-run from its log and checked.
Pong terms
- The serve
- The ball from the centre toward the player who lost the last point, at an angle the seed chose, after a second's pause.
- The segments
- The eight parts of a paddle, each returning the ball at its own angle.