This Hiking App Lets Me Hit My Coworkers With a Baseball Bat

violence is never the answer. That being said, it is it was fun when I opened a hiking app and hit a Border editor with a baseball bat and made another slip on a banana peel. Afterwards, I continued my peaceful journey home. A little later, one of my fellow writers hit me not once, but twice with his own baseball bat. I wasn’t actually mad, but it prompted me to take a walk around the block so I could fight back.

That, in a nutshell, is the appeal of Stompers — an iOS app that encourages you to beat, outwit, and outdo your friends (or colleagues) in a Looney Tunes-like running.

The application is the creation of designer Soren Iverson. You may know Iverson by his “Unbalanced UI” Design series, in which he posts conceptual app mockups for features no one asked for but secretly wants. For example, this screenshot from Slack from coworkers texting you on nationally mandated holidays, getting a SWAT team called. In all of them there is a thread of absurd whimsy.

This whim is in Stompers, also. Part of this is the cartoonish, meme-like art style. This, says Iverson, is intentional. The art of the application is Jim Soperwho did character designs for Looney Tunes It is The Cuphead show. Instead of using profile photos, you create a Stomper avatar. (At the On the edgea disproportionate number of us have decided to have fuchsia skin.) There’s also a little section where you can see how many Danny DeVitos you’ve walked in a day or how many steps you have left before you reach the Moon. It all looks like an app from 2015, but with a twist healthy from irony poisoning.

It also wouldn’t be an Iverson project if Stompers it was not distorted in any way.

“The work I do often consists of taking things and turning them upside down, or just questioning a fundamental principle,” says Iverson. On the edge. “What if the step count could be changed by someone else? It’s very weird [because] that defeats the purpose in a way.”

The end result is more or less like this Looney Tunes do you know Mario Kart. As you “run”, you can pick up items to tinker with your friends. You can send friends via a fake shortcut, halving your step count for a 30-minute period. There are rockets that launch you forward 1,000 steps that you didn’t actually take. Baseball bats take you back 500 steps. Bananas have a 50% chance of knocking you down or propelling you 500 steps forward.

As a fitness tech reviewer, playing around with step counting is a fun experiment. I’m guilty as anyone of obsessing too much about metrics that don’t really matter. Sometimes I pout saying my final step counts Stompers it doesn’t reflect what I actually did in real life. But it also challenged me to question why getting credit is so important as I reach my goal of being more active.

Iverson says the ultimate goal of the game is to connect with friends. It’s not the same as answering a call, but it’s an easy, low-effort way to check in. Last week, I discovered that this is one of the game’s charms. While pacing my office over a problematic draft, I laughed when a colleague texted me saying, “Please stop moving.”

Stompers It’s still new, having been released last week. Even so, Iverson and his co-founder Josh Rozin already have big plans for the app’s future. Rozin said On the edge that an Android version is in development – ​​much to the relief of the Android faithful on the team. He also noted that the team is discussing a possible single-player version of the game. Both were hesitant to know what the script would be like beyond that, but Rozin says Stompers has “huge potential beyond physical conditioning”.

Whatever lies ahead, I liked it Stompers‘slightly crazy approach to competition. Sometimes I’m rotting on the couch, doomscrolling on TikTok, when I get a notification that someone has offended my Stomper avatar. Occasionally this will motivate me to go for a walk to get revenge. Other times I laugh because there’s a joke about them: I have a four-mile run planned for the next day. Anyway, I’m following the steps – might as well have some low-risk fun to go along with it.