Targ Game

Rules

This game shows you 4 cells of different colors : red, green, blue, yellow. At the back of one of these 4 cells is the photograph of an animal. At each trial your goal is to intuitively find which one. When you select the cell behind which the animal is hiding, the latter is revealed to you. If you make another choice, the solution cell wriggles, but does’nt show you the animal.

The little twist of the game

If you happen to hesitate too much, this game allows you to skip your turn. In that case, just use the arrow button. It’s the only game allowing you to do this.

The underlying concept, revolutionary when the game was created, was to offer a game that not only allows one to test his/her intuition but also – and most of all – allows to really make contact with it and develop it. The latter point is important, since it implies that, by training, the game enables a player to increase his/her scoring level with practice. To be able to skip turns when one doesn’t feel too strongly about which response is the solution, authorizes the fact of not knowing, and hence eases the pressure and favors let go.

Indeed, studies have shown that there was a learning process and that players would make good progress.

Why Targ ?

Russel Targ, physicisit at Stanford University, was in the 1970’s a leading figure of research on intuition, applied, in particular, to the Remote Viewing techniques. Like his comparse Hal Puthoff (see Puthoff Game), Targ pioneered the development of lasers and their applications, and was also one of the key personalities of the research program on the intuitive capacities carried out at Stanford Research Institute International. His research was published in Nature, in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) or the Proceedings of the American Association the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was invited to present his research at the USSR Academy of Sciences. As a physicist, Targ has worked at Lockheed. He’s written a dozen books.

As an anecdote, in 1968, Targ associates himself with a young engineer named Nolan Bushnell. Who is no less than the future founder of the video games company Atari ! Targ and Bushnell build an electronic version of the game, in an arcade terminal style. The two buddies then set up their machines in local pizzerias and get a substantial income from it. It’s a success ! However, they fail getting distributed nationwide, since the topic of intuition is too unsettling in that era witnessing the birth of the very first electronic games. The game’s visual and music of this Classics edition is our tribute to those days and these pioneers.