HOBAGI MART
In our previous works BARC and SCAN TO PLAY, we explored barcode systems through the everyday affordances of handheld barcode scanners, how barcodes can link digital and physical spaces, and the defamiliarization of the visual form of the barcode. With HOBAGI MART, we instead explore how the relationships between player, barcode, and scanner shape barcode interaction.
In HOBAGI MART, players take on the role of a checkout cashier serving customers in a surreal retail environment. However, unlike a conventional store, numerous barcodes are attached onto a single object.
Customers arrive requesting a number of items and holding certain discounts. Factors such as the time of day and weather ingame enable further discounts to be entered. Players must physically manipulate and rotate the object to find the correct barcodes and present them to a fixed scanner in order to fufill customers’ requests with the lowest price possible. What would normally be a straightforward part of the retail experience becomes an exercise in orientation, creating an interaction that is at once familiar and absurdly exaggerated.
By slowing down an interaction normally designed for efficiency, HOBAGI MART highlights the bodily negotiation and alignment that embedding within barcode scanning. Barcodes, typically invisible infrastructure for rapid transaction, become a site of play, and physical engagement. Drawing on the ubiquity of barcodes in everyday environments, the project utilizes existing barcoded objects, transforming them into the controller and part of the game world, demonstrating how machine-readable surfaces can be repurposed into spaces for embodied play.
HOBAGI MART was featured at make.ctrl.Japan in Bitsummit 2026
Led by Yong Zhen Zhou.
Yong Zhen Zhou
Clement Zheng
Development
Yong Zhen Zhou
Art
Yong Zhen Zhou
Sheryl Teng