If Twister was an iPhone Game...

One of the major buzzwords of the 21st Century in gaming - along with 'user-generated content', 'casual', and the term 'buzzword' itself - is ‘social gaming’. There were always multiplayer games, but that branch of the industry has grown almost as heavy as the tree itself.

Nintendo appears to spend its entire advertising budget on commercials in which family members and celebrity chums sledge each other for not being very good at games on the DS and Wii. Sony's hardware, meanwhile, has brought us games like Singstar, Guitar Hero and Buzz!

The mobile platform has seen its share of social game conversions as well. From Monopoly to Settlers of Catan, it’s possible to play on mobile almost any of the games that one inevitably dusts off when the family decides, against all reason, to converge upon a single point.

What about Twister, though? Twister not only brings players together, but it forces them to touch each other. It doesn't get much more social than that. A video game conversion is long overdue.

How would it work on mobile? Not very well. In fact, to get the most out of this franchise a developer would be wise to consider iPhone, on which it would work a little something like this...

Twister on iPhone

The first thing you get to do is choose the number of players, from one to four. If there aren’t enough human opponents to play against, you can play against a minimum of one AI opponent, and a maximum of three.

There are eight characters to choose from, each distinguished by the distribution of three abilities in their respective profiles: Balance, Strength, and Sexual Attractiveness. If you complete the single player Story mode, you unlock a special character who is maximally endowed in all three categories. His name is Rob.

Beyond these generic qualities, each character has a particular propensity and a particular aversion. Graham is gerontophobe, for example, and incomfortable near Gladys (despite her high level of sexual attractiveness). Gregory is a chauvinist, meanwhile, and therefore hates touching Janet.

If a character does come into close proximity with another character he dislikes, this affects his ability to balance, although a good Strength score will compensate for this. If the character he is avoiding is attracted to him, it’s even harder for him to balance as he needs to lean farther away.

I know what you're thinking: this is all very well, but how does the game actually work?

Simple. First you press a button on the screen to activate the spinner. Then, once you’ve got your coordinates, you hold your finger down on one of your character’s limbs and draw it slowly across to the circle in question. The slower you move, the harder it gets to balance, but if you move too fast you lose control of the limb and your character collapses.

If you’re the first to move, this process is relatively easy. If you’re the last, you need to work your character in around everybody else, which is both a curse and a blessing: you can use other players to prop you up, but you have to be careful not to knock them over.

Once you’ve put all four limbs in position, it becomes a game of balance using the iPhone accelerometer. You need to hold your iPhone face upwards - if you list, your character lists, on the one hand allowing you to delicately manoeuvre yourself away from distracting elements, but on the other making you fall if you go too far. The accelerometer settings are twitchingly sensitive.

Being a video game, things don’t stop there. As well as the positioning and balancing mechanic, there’s the possibility to earn bonus points by doing things like holding yourself away from a repellent character, and close to an attractive one. Bonus points are awarded for making contact with primary or secondary sexual organs.

There are also wildcard events that you need to react to as they happen. These include earthquakes, itches, belches, farts, and the occasional appearance of a nasally inquisitive beagle called Todd.

The single player Story mode entails completing challenges set by the game. The first of these asks you to maintain your balance for a single round (until the first opponents falls). The last stipulates that you maintain your balance during an earthquake whilst positioned between two opponents whom you find physically repellent while Todd sniffs your groin and Glady farts into your mouth.

I’ve played it in my imagination. It’s really hard.