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Video Games to Help You Relax
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Irish game developers have unveiled their latest project, a game that helps you to relax, through the use of electrodes that are attached to a player's fingers and as the person relaxes, their dragon moves faster.
The game uses galvanic skin response technology which works by measuring the ability of the skin to conduct electricity."
This could be very therapeutic. It's funny that people need incentive for well-being. Some of us need to learn to chill out!
I don't know about you, but fast moving dragons always cause me to relax.
It would seem to me, that the developers would have better luck going in the opposite direction (i.e. the goal being to get the dragon to walk). You would start off the game with the dragon flying, and as you relax and calm down the dragon also relaxes and calms down...
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
A few months back on here, there was an article about these Germans who invented the Painstation, which offered a little negative reenforcement when you screwed up. I think a truly challenging game would be one where you had to relax, or you risked getting shocked. See how relaxed you can be under threat of torture!
Come to think of it, that might not be a bad way to train yourself for polygraph examinations, either...
They that would sacrifice their
This cool game, tranquility, can help you relax in that flowing, feeling-like-plankton kinda way, you know?
... and more weird stuff that I've found myself addicted to.
There's no dying, all levels are custom built for you by with help from their server
Works with OS X, OS 9, Win 98 - XP, while a Linux version is in the works.
J
"If you can get it to fly, it means you have got into a nice relaxed state," he explained. The game takes place in a virtual 3D world set aboard a starship in space. The environment is designed to immerse the player, drawing more of their attention and making the feedback more effective.
Why does this remind me of a certain Star Trek: TNG episode I've seen?
Yup, I don't know what it's called, but I saw this (and used it) at the Edinburgh Science Festival in 1993, 1994, 1995.
Of course, the tighter you strapped the sensors on the easier it was to become a star...
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
About 10 years ago I used to work at a place called the Other 90%. The ownerr was a guy named Ron something or other. He was the guy who killed Atari. We made a device called the MindDrive which basically was a finger unit that used galvonic skin response.
Needless to say it was useless for gamers. Gamers want to sit down and play games, not teach their bodies to react to their thoughts.
A radio station in San Francisco, where we were located, found that a peeled grape could play the games better than they could.
There's a lot more to gvs than relaxing.
This has been done before... I wish companies would do their research every once-in-a-while.
-- -- A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child
To borrow a Clintonian phrase, it depends on the meaning of relaxing.
These guys appear to be using the metaphor of the game as a way to make biofeeback (that is, the user training himself to enter a particular mental state at will), well, less boring.
For gaming, I'm one of those old-school 80s types. Get an arcade machine and master one of those pure-adrenaline-overkill games. Robotron:2084 and Tempest are probably tops for this. Lots of flashing lights, sounds, and you're totally interrupt-driven the duration of the play.
When you're just starting out, it's frustrating. When you're merely "good", it's fun, but you work up a sweat. When you get past that point and can keep a game going for 15-20 minutes, you get a hypnotic effect. Most players call it "the zone", and it's probably not too different from the mental states achieved by great athletes - you're barely conscious of yourself, focussed solely on your game, and your performance skyrockets.
The neat part is that you're no longer thinking per se, you just... umm... are. It's not "move joystick to dodge missile", it's "move this way and watch missile that I didn't even see fly harmlessly past me".
Freaky shit.