Sega Toylets lets you game with your boy bits

Sega Toylets lets you game with your boy bits:

Sega, the once proud innovator of console design, is back in the gaming hardware business! Only not in the fashion you might think. The company has just rolled out a trial of its Toylets system, which embeds a pressure sensor into otherwise innocuous urinals and gives life to every bad piece of joystick-related innuendo you ever heard. Four games are available right now, to be enjoyed through a display mounted at eye level, including one where the intensity of your delivery helps blow a girl’s skirt up and another that offers (asynchronous!) multiplayer competition. The latter game matches you against the previous dude to have used the porcelain repository, thereby finally providing Japanese men with a measurable way to settle pissing contests…

Follow the original link to see a video. The best part? Sega uses one of those peeing-boy-fountains to demonstrate the system.

p.s. Fun should be fun

FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious:

It’s only about exploiting the players and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don’t find much interest in FarmVille, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it’s not about designing a fun game. It’s not about designing something that’s going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way — it’s actually about designing something that’s a negative experience.

It’s about “How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity” — but it actually makes people worry about it when they’re away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it’s about, “How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?” And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that’s all those games are, basically.

(Excerpted quote originally from the interview Catching Up With Jonathan Blow)

Albert Einstein: “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”

Earlier today I stumbled across the quote that serves as the title of this post. There was no context or commentary. As my curiosity had been piqued, I did some poking around. The most interesting thing I found is a blurb from the jacket cover of a book authored by Thomas G. West.

Thinking Like Einstein: Returning To Our Visual Roots With The Emerging Revolution In Computer Information Visualization:

…In trying to explain the origins of his ideas, Einstein said that all of his most important and productive thinking was done by “combinatory play” with “images” in his mind. Only at a secondary stage did he “laboriously” translate these images into “conventional words” or the signs of mathematics.

According to Thomas G. West, Albert Einstein was a classic example of a strong visual thinker, a person who tends to think in images and visual patterns and sometimes has difficulty with words and numbers. In West’s award-winning book, IN THE MIND’S EYE, he discussed connections between highly talented, visually oriented people like Einstein and learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Now, in THINKING LIKE EINSTEIN, West investigates the new worlds of visual thinking, insight, and creativity made possible by computer graphics and information visualization technologies. He argues that with the rapid spread of less costly but powerful computers, humanity is now at the beginning of a major transition, moving from an old world based mainly on words and numbers to a new world where high-level work in all fields will eventually involve insights based on the display and manipulation of complex information using moving computer images.

Intriguing thought — information visualization and conceptualization that just begs to be played with.

Metropolis II: the kinetic sculpture built out of boy racer dreams

For a sense of scale, note the dude on the right. Metropolis II is like a Matchbox® car track with serious glandular issues.

Playful Art: Metropolis II [video]

Metropolis II: the kinetic sculpture built out of boy racer dreams:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has got itself a new toy. Or, to be more precise, it’s got itself a whole fleet of Hot Wheels mini speedsters, courtesy of one Chris Burden. He’s the gent responsible for dreaming up Metropolis II, the above interwoven set of tracks and circuits, which is populated with 1,200 “custom designed” cars, 13 toy trains, and some assorted scenery built out of Lego, tiles, and wood blocks.

Chris Burden’s Cars in Los Angeles:

The California artist Chris Burden may be in his 60s, but he is still playing with toys. The thing is, the older he gets the more outrageously complicated the toys become.

Two years ago he created a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper that stood in Rockefeller Center, and in 2004 he made “Metropolis I,” composed of 80 Hot Wheels toy cars zooming around two single-lane highways along with monorail trains chugging on tracks of their own…

In “Metropolis II,” by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”

Why we laugh

Why do we laugh? What is laughter’s purpose? What does it profit us? Why is it built-in and not learned? Does it say something about our humanity?

The Evolutionary Origin of Laughter:

The social brain hypothesis is that language evolved as a way of establishing and strengthening bonds with larger numbers of individuals in a shorter a period of time. Conversation can easily include up to 10 individuals and would have been a skill that dramatically improves the fitness of these individuals for life in the group.

Laughter is simply an extension of this process, say Marijuán and Navarro. Since the act of talking limits the number of individuals who can take part in a conversation, laughter is a method that individuals use to signal their participation in larger group chats. And the result of all this extra bonding is that the larger group, and hence the individuals within it, flourishes. 

Laughter is a similar kind of release [to that of blushing], say Marijuán and Navarro. The intellectual momentum that builds up during conversation needs to be relieved, either through verbalisation or some other mechanism.

Marijuán and Navarro’s suggestion is that this other mechanism is the channelling of excess cortical excitations to parts of the brain responsible for vocalisation. But without anything specific to say, the result is the kind of panting and cackling that we call laughter. That’s why it is built in. This social significance of this behaviour is the thing that has evolved, not the activity itself. 

So laughter (and by extension fun and playfulness — not just “intellectual momentum”) is intimately linked to bonding and bonding to the success of social groups. In my opinion, this is why it is good and healthy for adults to play. And maybe we need just a little help in the form of creative technologies to get us there.