Thirty seconds a round, 1,893 rounds in ten days

VALORANT is a shooting game. The people who come to its exhibition are players, and the first thing they do with a gun is check whether it shoots straight.

The piece also had to run for ten days in a row, from opening to closing every day.

Pick up the light gun and hit the target on the screen, and the game starts. After a count of three, the nine targets on the grid light up in turn. Your score is the number you hit in thirty seconds.

Then you type a name, and the score goes on the Today’s Best board, which tells you where you stand today. The board starts again every day, so every day somebody gets to be first.

The hardware is the light gun and the sensors on the four edges of the screen. The software is the game, the aim calibration for each gun, the leaderboard, and a back office for the people running the exhibition.

On installation day the screen was already set into the exhibition’s scenic wall. The software has a setup mode that draws the centre lines and the edge positions on the screen itself. We fitted the sensors to those marks, calibrated each gun, and finished in one afternoon.

Everything except the screen fits in one suitcase. Once it was in, the computer was set to switch itself on and off every day.

From the first round on 21 August, the evening before the opening, to the last on the closing night of 30 August, the game was played 1,893 times, an average of 189 rounds a day. The busiest day was Sunday 23 August, with 292.

The leaderboard collected 1,209 different names.

None of these figures is an estimate. Every round is recorded in the back office, where it can be read day by day and exported.

Once an interactive piece opens, the question asked most often is how many people played. This one was counting from its first round, so the answer was there when the project closed.