Be The Starfish

Josh Horowitz & Paula Te

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a starfish? It’s probably EXACTLY LIKE the game we made, Be The Starfish.

One of the most fun and classic creatures to spot in Les are the blue Linckia starfish. They live in sub-tidal waters, close enough to the surface that snorkelers can find them amongst the rocks and coral. The typical blue starfish is found posed in classic star pose, with its five arms outstretched. However, you can also find blue starfish in many other poses such as lounging, folded, hands up, and squished.

Humans anthropomorphize everything they come across, and starfish are no exception. We’ve created a game where we ask humans to imitate starfish poses in order to become starfish. Players are shown a starfish from a collection of starfish photos (photos: Paula) and a camera streaming to a browser program running MoveNet detects whether or not you’ve matched the starfish pose.

To know whether your body has matched the starfish pose, we data on starfish poses. We acquired this data with a custom web tool that lets a crowdsourced Mechanical Turk worker (Paula) drag points to match the shape of the starfish. When matching, we imagine that the five limbs of the body (the head is a limb) are transplanted, at their original angles, onto the center of the sea star. Arm and leg data is simplified to focus on the angles of the joints rather than the length of the limbs.

The closer your pose gets to matching the starfish pose, the greener your avatar becomes, and the higher the star-o-meter rises. When you win, your picture is taken and displayed amongst all the previous winners who became that starfish. Winning is a source of pride and silliness to most players. Alex Bachmeyer says, “You’re so focused on the starfish pose that you forget what your face looks like.” When we contemplated that the game was too hard and that we could lower the threshold for pose accuracy, Josh Muffin Gordonson says, “It’s important to struggle in order to win.” So we kept it that way.

Players found more than one way to become the starfish. Legs were particularly difficult to pose correctly: some found props to put their legs up when the starfish had jaunty leg angles; others found that sitting in a chair helped free up their limbs to move more freely. Andy Quitmeyer suggested that the game could be played lying down, much like a starfish would be lying on the seafloor or on a rock. We decided that would be too easy for humans, though, and let gravity be a part of the challenge. Other extra challenges included trying to pose like the pincushion sea star or the 6-armed Luzon sea star.

← Pincushion ← Luzon

You can play yourself at https://joshuahhh.com/starfish/, and check out the code at https://github.com/joshuahhh/starfish.

Next steps might include: improving graphics by creating a 3d model of the blue starfish with articulated arms that players could puppet around; combining it with the hug-a-blue-starfish game made by Marie Flanagan et al.

Thanks to Liong Leong and iNaturalist for helping us identify the starfish. 🙏