n a rather chilling case of dystopian sci-fi made real, some Canadians have created a modified Xbox gamepad that draws blood from your arm every time your in-game character takes damage. According to the gamepad’s creators, the idea is to hold “blood donation gaming events” — to bolster blood bank reserves (which are always in short supply), and also to make gamers “think about more important issues while still doing what they love.” While this is ostensibly a rather noble effort, it’s hard not to see this as the first step towards extreme gaming and e-sports where losers actually die in real life.
The system, which is rather scarily called Blood Sport, is fairly simple in its design. Basically, the creators found an old blood collection machine, and then connected its pump to an Xbox 360 gamepad via an Arduino microcontroller. Every time the gamepad rumbles/vibrates, the Arduino tells the machine to draw some blood. The creators say their system should work with any console/gamepad that has the rumble feature, but they’ve only modified a single Xbox controller so far. Apparently the Arduino keeps track of how much blood has been drawn, so that no one dies.
Blood Sport – connecting the blood collection machine to the gamepad’s rumble/vibration mechanism
The next step, obviously, as it isn’t much fun to lose blood to an NPC, is to modify another gamepad and acquire another blood collection machine so that you can play against other people. Thus, Blood Sport turned to Kickstarter for funding. At the time of publishing, however, the project had been suspended — with no word from Kickstarter or the project owners as to why. Presumably it’s because Kickstarter simply found the idea a little bit squeamish — though I’m sure the site has crowdfunded lots of other weird projects over the years.
Here’s the promotional video for Blood Sport. It’s not particularly graphic, but if you’re not a fan of blood you may want to skip it.
So, for now, Blood Sport has been put on ice — but, fortunately (unfortunately?) such novel and convoluted ideas don’t just vanish. Now, for better or worse, the world is thinkingabout combining video games and blood collection. At the very least, such a system could be employed by real clinics to improve the allure of blood collection — speaking for myself, I would be much more inclined to donate blood if it involved fragging some Halo noobs.
Obviously, though, I think we should be much more interested in the potential for extreme and dangerous uses of the technology. There is a very, very fine line between charitable gaming and an e-sports tournament to the death. Imagine if the Arduino bugs out, and keeps drawing blood past the safety threshold. Or imagine an extreme e-sports league, where there is no safety threshold — where dying in Counter-Strike or Dota 2 actually hits you in real life, diminishing your abilities and increasing the likelihood that you’ll lose more and more blood until… well, you get the idea. Amusingly enough, maybe this would encourage gamers to physically exercise more, or to take a leaf out of other competitive sports and start using steroids and blood doping. (Or who knows, maybe e-sports professionals are already doing that?)
The future of e-sports?
I’m starting to get ahead of myself — but I think we can all agree that such a scenario, as worrying as it sounds, doesn’t seem too far beyond the realms of reality. Whether it’s VR, brain implants, bionic retinas, brain-computer interfaces (or even brain-to-brain telepathy), we are clearly moving towards a world where the once-clear divide between humans and their tools is blurred. Today it’s the merging of fun and games and drawing blood — tomorrow, it’s a generation of humans that have had an augmented reality device attached to their head since shortly after birth.
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