Attract mode

An arcade cabinet with nobody standing at it was not allowed to sit there dark. It cycled: a title card, the high score table, a stretch of gameplay driven by scripted or recorded input, then round again. The reason was commercial rather than decorative, since a cabinet that shows what it is gets fed coins and one that shows a blank screen does not, but the constraint that came with it is the interesting part. The loop had to surrender the moment a hand touched it, and it had to surrender cleanly, because a player who pressed start and got the tail end of a demo would think the machine was broken. Every later use inherits both halves: museum kiosks, retail demo units on a shop floor, airport wayfinding boards, and the product tour that starts playing when a landing page has been open for a while.

The rules are short and each one is a failure mode in disguise. Fall into the loop only after an idle threshold long enough that a person who is reading, not gone, is never interrupted. Loop rather than play once, since nobody is there to see it end. Surrender on the first input, and this is the one that gets botched most often: the gesture that wakes the screen must not be spent on waking it, or the first tap of every visitor’s session vanishes and the kiosk earns a reputation for ignoring people. Leave no state behind, so the next person starts from a genuine beginning rather than three steps into somebody else’s session. And make the loop legible as a demonstration rather than as a live session, usually by keeping it obviously synthetic: a visible cursor, a caption, a pace no real hand would keep.

This site runs one. Every specimen on a term page plays its own choreography on a loop, with a ghost cursor and key chips standing in for a hand, until a reader takes the stage over, and the same script doubles as the demo’s test in CI. That is also why the specimens obey the last rule below.

Because the last rule is the one an arcade cabinet never had to think about: a loop that plays without being asked is exactly the motion a prefers-reduced-motion visitor has asked not to be given. Motion nobody requested, running indefinitely, in the corner of someone’s eye, is the textbook case for that preference, so attract mode does not run at all under it and the screen rests on a still frame that a control can play once on request. The related restraint is attention rather than accessibility: an attract loop off screen is a loop burning a battery for nobody, which is why the honest implementations pause the moment they are not being looked at. If what you actually want is to teach one specific thing to a person who is present, the tools for that are an onboarding tour or a feature spotlight, both of which are allowed to interrupt precisely because someone is there to interrupt.