Of course, what passes for work inside Double Fine might resemble play at other companies. Schafer sidles up to a duo testing what looks like a computerized funhouse mirror. He wiggles from side to side, and the screen shows him rippling like a sine wave. He turns around, and his virtual body corkscrews.
They're building the sequel to Happy Action Theater, a "video toy" published by Microsoft this year. It uses Microsoft's Kinect controller, a camera that transforms body motion into videogame action. In a recent meeting, designers spent two hours brainstorming different outlandish sequences for the game, such as one where a fox plays bongo drums on a series of eggs, out of which hatches a miniature version of the player.