Violence is never the answer. That said, that it was funny when i opened a walking app and hit a Verge editor with a baseball bat and slipped on a banana peel again. I then continued my leisurely journey home. A little later, one of my fellow writers hit me more than once twice with his own baseball bat. I wasn’t really angry, but it made me want to walk around the block so I could get back at them.
That, in a nutshell, is the appeal of Stompers — an iOS app that encourages you to beat, trick and outdo your friends (or colleagues) in happy tunes– as a competition.
The app is the work of designer Soren Iverson. You may know Iverson from his “independent user interface” design series, in which he posts concept app mockups of features no one wanted but secretly wished for. For example, this Slack screenshot of co-workers texting you on nationally mandated holidays for SWAT teams to be called. There is a thread of absurdist whimsy in all of them.
This fad is in Stompers, too. Part of that is the cartoony, meme-like art style. That, Iverson says, is intentional. App art is by Jim Soper, who did character designs for happy tunes and The Cuphead show. Instead of using profile pictures, you create a Stomper avatar. (Att On the edge, a disproportionate number of us 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. Everything looks like an app from around 2015, but with a healthy dose of irony poisoning.
Also, it wouldn’t be an Iverson project if Stompers it was not distorted in any way.
“The work I do is often about taking things and turning them upside down or just questioning a fundamental principle,” says Iverson On the edge. “What if the step counter could be tampered with by someone else? It’s really weird [because] it defeats the purpose somehow.
The end result is something like happy tunes answers Mario Kart. As you “race” you can pick up items to mess with your friends. You can send friends on a fake shortcut by cutting their number of steps in half for a period of 30 minutes. There are rockets that shoot you forward 1000 steps that you haven’t actually taken. Baseball bats throw you back 500 paces. Bananas have a 50 percent chance to knock you back or push you 500 steps forward.
As a fitness tech reviewer, messing around with step counts is a fun thought experiment. I’m as guilty as anyone of obsessing over metrics that don’t really matter. Sometimes I resent my last step being respected Stompers it doesn’t reflect what I actually did in real life. But it also made me question why getting credit matters so much when I’ve achieved my goal of being more active.
Iverson says the ultimate goal of the game is to bond with friends. It’s not the same as catching up on a call, but it’s an easy way to check in with little effort. Over the past week, I’ve discovered that this is one of the charms of the game. While pacing my office over a nasty draft, I laughed when a colleague DMed me to say, “Please stop moving.”
Stompers still new, just launched last week. However, Iverson and his co-founder Josh Rozin already have big plans for the app’s future. Rosin said On the edge that an Android version is in the works – much to the relief of Android loyal employees. He also noted that the team is discussing a potential single-player version of the game. Both objected to what the roadmap looks like beyond that, but Rosin says Stompers has “tremendous potential beyond fitness.”
Whatever was coming, I was enjoying it Stompers“slightly crazy approach to competition. Sometimes I’ll be rotting on the couch scrolling through TikTok when I get a notification that someone has hacked my Stomper avatar. Every once in a while this will motivate me to go for a walk so I can get my revenge. Other times I’ll giggle because it’s their joke: I have a four-mile run planned for the next day. Either way, I’m taking the plunge – might as well have some low-stakes fun to go with it.
