Clay TV

The Clay TV is a television set modeled in pink clay that sits in the upper right corner of Maxine's Quest, the browser game and instrument interface of Molecular Reality Corporation. It is meant to show the live electric current through a nanopore on the company's bench while the player fights the mushrooms that the same current summons. In the standard version of the game it shows a flat line. The experimental second version connects it, and a click on it enlarges the graph to cover most of the game.^[1][2]

The frame is a photograph of a hand-modeled object: a pink-mauve clay television with a lumpy rim, an oval knob and two rectangular buttons down its right side, a slot below the screen and three small dots in the lower right corner. Its screen is transparent, and the game draws the graph inside it.^[1]

The graph plots one column per packet of signal, the oldest on the left. Each column is a vertical stroke from the lowest to the highest current in its packet, light green, with a white dot at the mean; a packet that contained a spike is drawn in pink and twice as thick. The vertical scale follows the data, with 12 percent of headroom above and below, and moves 15 percent of the way toward each new range on every frame, so the trace settles instead of jumping.^[1] A spike on the screen is a current blockade, the dip in current while a particle sits in the pore.

The television is bound at start-up to the game's signal ring, and at that moment the ring is the random one, which keeps no record of the signal. With nothing to plot, the graph draws its fallback: a single horizontal line across the middle of the screen, in the trace's light green at a little over a third of its brightness. Switching to Live Signal mode builds a new ring for the data of the live molecular stream, but the television keeps its reference to the old one. It therefore shows the same flat line in both modes, beside a ring of 300 signal lines that does move.^[1]

On May 19, 2026, the company added an experimental copy of the game. Its first day of work included the commits "Fix maxine-v2: restore original clay TV and add stub methods for experimenter mode" and "Fix: revert enhanced clay TV and fix toggle function".^[3] The copy gives the television a buffer of its own, 300 packets long, and hands it the live buffer whenever Live Signal mode is switched on.^[2]

In Random mode the second version feeds the television from a simulator whose comment promises "the characteristic telegraph signal of single-molecule measurements": a current that jumps at random between the open level of the pore and two blockade levels, as the current through a single ion channel does when it opens and shuts. On May 27 the display was rewritten to draw a continuous trace. The commit explains that the old columns had let the simulator's discrete levels stack into "horizontal 'tiers' creating a bar-chart appearance".^[4]

Clicking the television switches Experimenter Mode on and off. Over 350 milliseconds the graph grows from 210 by 150 pixels to 1,780 by 1,040, covering most of the arena, and the clay frame is tinted green. The mushrooms carry on behind it.^[2]

In the company's 2022 design for the game's console, the same corner held a "Data TV". According to the December 2022 overview, "In the upper right, a 'Data TV' shows live current data from the amplifier, and can also be switched to different channels that show various real-time data analytics, such as 2D histograms".^[5] In nanopore work such a histogram usually plots each event's depth against its dwell time, so that molecules of different sizes and charges fall into separate clusters. Only one channel made it into 2026.

A screenshot of live play in that overview shows a pink clay frame like the present one, with a green trace on its screen. Beside it was the panel with the voltage knob and the zapper, which formed the on-screen half of the demonpore 64: a reader built in 2020 and 2021 in the shape of a home video game console, whose controls, apart from a joystick, were drawn on screen.^[5]

• Bestiary of Maxine's Quest
• Experigaming