Motion control used to mean buying hardware — a Kinect, a Wii, a VR headset. Today an ordinary laptop webcam plus an on-device pose model can follow your body well enough to play real games, and indie developers have run with it. This is a guide to free, body-controlled webcam games you can play right now in a browser, and to finding more of them on itch.io, the home of indie games. Disclosure: the five games in the first half are ours, made by the indie team behind CamPlay.
What you need
- A laptop or desktop with a webcam, or a TV with a USB webcam plugged into a computer. No gamepad, no sensor, no wearable.
- A recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. The games run in the browser, so nothing is installed.
- About a metre of space between you and the screen. CamPlay tracks the upper body, so you do not need room for your feet to be in frame.
- Decent light in front of you, not a bright window behind you. That one fix solves most tracking problems.
1. Rune Run — the endless runner you jog through
Rune Run is an endless runner where your legs are the throttle. Jog in place to run, and the harder you pump your arms the faster you go; jump for real over obstacles, duck under beams and step sideways to switch lanes. It is the most cardio-heavy game on the list, and it has live race rooms where friends run the same course as ghost runners alongside you.
2. Red Light, Green Light — freeze or you are out
In Red Light, Green Light you sprint on green and freeze the instant the doll turns. The webcam sees every twitch, so stopping dead is the whole skill. It is brutal in multiplayer: up to eight players race the same field, the lights change at the same moment for everyone, and players are eliminated live.
3. Simon Says — the party game that tries to trick you
Simon Says shouts commands — jump, duck, lean, run in place — and you only obey when Simon says so. Commands speed up and the trick commands get sneakier. It is the best one for a group around a TV, and if the host leaves mid-game the room carries on with a new host.
4. Dino Dodge — survive the stampede
Dino Dodge drops you into a 3D prehistoric valley: duck diving pterosaurs, jump scurrying compys, step sideways out of a raptor’s path and outlast the T-rex. Slow-motion moments ask you to lean and hold, which makes a well-timed dodge feel fantastic.
5. Ski Slalom — carve a mountain with your hips
Ski Slalom is the most analog of the five: lean left and right to carve between gates on a winding mountain, fold or squat into a tuck to pick up speed, stand tall to brake, and jump logs for big air. The tuck is a real squat hold — your quads will notice by the bottom of the run.
Finding more body-controlled indie games on itch.io
Five games will not be enough for everyone, and the wider indie scene is full of motion-control experiments. itch.io is where most of them live. Some tips for digging them up:
- Search and browse by tag. Try webcam, motion control, exergame, Kinect, face tracking and hand tracking — developers tag inconsistently, so try several.
- Filter to HTML5 / “play in browser” if you do not want to download anything. Many webcam projects are browser builds already.
- Check game jams. Jams with themes about the body, movement or unusual controls produce lots of webcam prototypes; the jam results page is a curated list.
- Read the requirements before you play. Some projects need a Kinect, a Leap Motion or a VR headset, and some only run on Windows.
- Read what the game does with your camera. A good project says whether video is processed locally or sent anywhere. If it does not say, ask in the comments.
- Tip the developer. Most of these are passion projects, and pay-what-you-want is how many indie devs keep making them.
For a side-by-side look at the two approaches — a huge open marketplace versus one platform built only for body-controlled games — see CamPlay vs itch.io for body-controlled games.
Why these games are worth your evening
Body-controlled games are the rare games that leave you better off than when you started. Every CamPlay game estimates calories from the movement it sees, and a hard session of Rune Run or Red Light sits in the moderate-to-vigorous intensity range the activity guidelines care about — the research is summarised in do active video games count as real exercise?. Mostly, though, they are just fun with friends in a way a gamepad game in the same room is not: everyone can see everyone else flailing.