Johann Sebastian Joust is novel for many reasons, not the least of which being that it's a game about exchanging blows with friends and strangers while protecting - to the outside observer - a florescent magic wand.

The actual magic of Joust, however, is that (unlike just about every other video game in existence) there's only one rule hardwired into its barebones logic system: If you move your controller beyond the acceptable motion threshold, you lose.

The Mac-based game client reads the gyroscopic output of each players' Move controllers, distributing a warning rumble to players who approach that threshold; or a deafening, game-ending boom to those who pass it. The meat of the game - the manner in which you jostle your opponents' controllers while defending your own - is left purely to the invention and adjudication of its two-to-seven players. For example: Is kicking allowed? Shoving? Projectile weaponry?

Joust rides at the vanguard of a genre that's as old as written language, but entirely new to video game culture. It's part of a movement heralded by bands of independent game developers and digital artists searching for unexplored intersections between virtual mediums and physical interactions. Joust is, in the grand tradition of Tag, Hide and Go Seek and Red Rover before it, a folk game.

Kind of.

Johann Sebastian Joust in Death Valley! from Die Gute Fabrik on Vimeo.

IT'S MORE LIKE AN ACTUAL MEDIEVAL JOUST THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE

The term "Folk Game" has been co-opted somewhat from its original definition. Traditionally, folk games feature no specialized equipment, and their few, player-mediated rules are subject to transform as they're transmitted orally between cultures and generations. Folk games are old and ubiquitous, created by ancient forerunners and played by millions of schoolchildren across the globe.

Video-folk games, however, are the interest of only dozens, maybe hundreds.

Douglas Wilson's entire career has centered on the possible implications of this untapped genre. He's currently a student of the IT University of Copenhagen Center for Computer Games Research, finishing his Ph.D in Interaction Design and Design Theory. He the co-owner of Die Gute Fabrik, the small development team behind last year's arthouse puzzle-platformer Where is My Heart, among other, more physically demanding titles. He's a co-founder of the Copenhagen Game Collective, a group of artists and developers which could just as easily and aptly rename itself "The Monsters of Folk Gaming."

It was at the 2011 Nordic Game Jam - a 48-hour development marathon organized by the Collective and the IGDA - where Wilson first came up with the concept for Joust; a concept fueled by a simple, yet poignant observation.

"Moving in slow-motion is fucking fun," Wilson says, with the conviction of a man who has had to defend this very point at the highest academic level. "It's basically the funnest thing you can do. That was my thesis going into that project: Moving in slow motion is rad, and we should do a game about that."