I lived in Williamsburg before it was cool. True story. If you’re not familiar with this hipster pocket of Brooklyn, it’s filled with trucker hats and beards and ironic t-shirts and retro sunglasses and paying way too much for a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Now there’s a way of sharing this hipster paradise with your whole family, with an app called Williamspurrrrg. It’s as easy as adding hipster accessories to cats—Or is it?
When you first begin, you must simply slide a mustache onto a cat. Level up! Then you gradually work your way up to adding multiple accessories to multiple cats. Suddenly it’s not so simple, not because it’s hard to figure out where everything goes, but because you have to hold everything in place at the same time–nothing will lock into place until everything is in place. Unless you’ve got super long double-jointed fingers, you’re going to need another pair of hands. Time to grab your kid. As my 8-year-old daughter said, “This game is hard with just one person.”
Williamspurrrrg is the brainchild of my friend Dr. Carla Fisher, an advocate of co-playing with your kids. She designed this app specifically to promote dialogic play, where you do more that play with your kids, you talk about the play that you’re experiencing together. She has many tips for promoting dialogic play with your average app, but with Williamspurrrrg she puts her money where her mustache is. You get about five levels in before you realize you’d like this game so much more if you played with another person.
My daughter and I previewed the app, and sure enough, I found us having some interesting conversations about the levels. The level design surprised us when the biggest mustache went on the smallest cat and the smallest mustache went on the biggest cat. And sometimes, it just made us laugh.
The app has just hit the app store. Grab it now at its introductory price of $0.99. It’s awesome to play with your kids. It’s also awesome to play with your hipster pals while sipping your Pabst in a rooftop bar with views of Manhattan.
