The year is 1983. A kid – the Kid – sneaks into the backroom of the local arcade and discovers a secret 3D videogame from the future(!), played by waving a virtual reality wand controller – wow! But suddenly the machine emits a blinding light and the Kid is inexplicably transported into the game, into the wacky magical world of Tryl! Under the tutelage of Magic Jönsson, the legendary Swedish basketball-star-turned-magician, the Kid sets off to defeat the evil wizard Kalpa and make things right...

Tryl: Videogame of the Future (formerly known as Face-off in the Magic Circle) is a multi-player spell dueling game designed for the physical game controllers. The game lets players sling spells at one another in a game of dexterity and strategy. Using their controller as a wand, players draw fluid, emergent gestures – in their own personal style – to charge up spells of different magic types.

But unlike many other gestural console games, Tryl pushes players to look at each other, rather than at the screen. To succeed, players must “read” their opponent and time their spells carefully.

We believe that when players are forced to look at the screen, rather than at each other, they miss out on all the rich emotion and information encoded in human facial expressions. Tryl aims to explore this terrain, combining the face-to-face interactions of traditional playground games and backyard pretend play with the computational power and multimedia capabilities of console machines.

Our aim is to re-energize the feeling of playing with each other, as opposed to the feeling of playing just against a game system. In most multiplayer videogames, players must carefully follow the action rendered on screen in order to understand the state of the game. In Tryl, the real action takes place off the screen and in the physical world, helping to free players from the tyranny of the television set.