Pee-powered games

I spent this morning reviewing the world’s first pee-powered games machine, a hands-free device launched at The Exhibit bar, Balham, South London. Sent by Time Out to blog the experience, my word count limit meant that I didn’t have the opportunity to report on some of the more geeky aspects of the launch. So, for the really interested urine-driven gamers out there, here’s the full transcript of my interview with developers Gordon MacSween and Mark Melford, dealing with questions like, “Wasn’t the world’s first pee-powered games machine released in Japan in January?” and “What’s in it for the women?” For the complete lowdown, read on.

Who came up with the idea?

Mark Melford: I think Gordon did.

Gordon MacSween: And it’s probably not unique. Do you know the story of the little fly in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam? It was a little social study that they did. They had these urinals with a little fly on, and they found that they didn’t have to clean up as much. People just couldn’t help but aiming for the fly. That’s been pretty much borne out, although we’re encouraging people to steer left and right. I just thought the fly was ok, but a bit boring; wouldn’t it be better if it was moving? That stayed as a discussion topic for quite a while until I saw that two guys from MIT had actually done this as a final year project. It was fine – it worked, and they got their degree, but it was pretty complicated, and it was a one-off. It had wires coming down and a big plastic molding, but it was enough to spark my interest. I thought that if there was a product that you could just fit to the wall, power up the internet, switch it on and start playing, then that would be saleable. So I pitched it to Mark, who picked up on the potential for entertainment advertising.

MM: I had a media consultancy business, so I was working with a lot of broadcasters and newspapers on strategy and driving more revenue through ad sales, so this apparently whacky idea, when you think about it… You’ve got an audience with a man for one minute.

GM: My wife would kill for that!

MM: The average “dwell time” length, we discovered, is 55 seconds for a man in the UK. Slightly longer for a man who is smiling, because it’s a funny thing. I thought there might be some media value in that. There are quite a few trends, particularly in out-of-home media, that make this quite timely. Spending on the digital signs around London that you see is growing at around 30% a year. More specifically, the location-based signs that you see, like the screens in taxis, hair salons – if you can capture someone when they’re still, and they have a dwell time of a few seconds, you can see that there’s a lot of interest in that field. Captive Media has a good heritage. Then there’s the executive channel, putting screens in elevators in the City, and there are a lot more very interesting concepts out there ­– putting big plasma screens on waste bins across London. It’s a crazy idea, recycling bins across London with a plasma screen on the side. It’s all because people respond much more to a moving image than a static one, according to the research. It shows that the recall rates are anything up to 8 times higher. So a digital screen in a place where people look at it struck me as a really interesting idea.

GM: The company that makes our product also made the ones at Liverpool Street Station, along the escalator. Our criteria [for producing the product] was that it had to be beautiful, so it’s attractive to the venue, but it also had to be rugged and 100% waterproof. But those ones at Liverpool Street ­– in order to keep your attention for the 50 seconds you’re on it, they’ve had to put in 60 screens.

Have you had any ideas about how to develop the pee-controlled games console for women yet?

MM: Yes we have. We are product designers, but we have to recognize our limitations, so anatomically speaking, there cannot be something like this for the ladies. But girls have a different problem: they have to queue at busy venues. So we have been trialing a simple screen that looks like these and carries a lot of the same content as these, either just showing the content or we’re experimenting with very simple forms of gesture recognition, so they can swipe, with a screen next to the hand-dryer or the mirror, but most importantly visible from the queue. Upstairs here [at The Exhibit], in the ladies bathroom we have a screen with a ladies’ channel showing specifically things that women have told us they’d like to see – celebrity gossip, fashion and make-up tips.

GM: What we have now that we didn’t when we started thinking about this is the software to manage thousands of screens if you need to. So we can say we want this stuff only to go into the ladies’, then we tag it for the ladies; if we want it only to go to London, we tag it for screens in London. So the bar owner can choose exactly what he wants, and he can say, “I want this only to go out after the watershed,” or “this is only for the weekend”, and we can schedule that in for them.

You’re saying this is the world’s first, but we saw something similar from SEGA in Tokyo in January (the Toylet). How do the two products differ?

GM: There were two aspects to it for us. On the one hand we thought someone’s doing the same thing; on the other hand, we looked at their product and, in a sense, it was the same as the MIT product I mentioned earlier. If you’ve got to take the product off the wall and drill it and put cables up, it’s going to be very difficult to make it vandal-proof. So we set out and developed and patented contactless sensors.

MM: I think [Sega] are trialing it. We’ve been reading that there’s an official launch coming up. In fact, it was publicized as being November 21, but it doesn’t seem to have happened.

GM: They definitely haven’t done what we set out to do. Theirs has a target and it measures how long you pee on it, and then at the end of the game it does things that we might regard as being in poor taste – but that’s a cultural thing. Whereas, we’ve done something where you can drive something left and right and you can play games on it. In the end, our bigger impression was that if someone as big as SEGA are looking at the same area, then it has probably got legs. It’d be daft to say we’re not worried about SEGA, because they’re massive, but we’re certainly not concerned about their initial product.

It sounds like SEGA’s has to do with pee power and pressure, which makes me worry about giving myself a hernia.

GM: Well, quite! Ours is much more to do with good aim. During our trials in Cambridge, what happened was that the first night we put it in, I was wondering what would happen, and I heard this group of Americans coming in and this one guy was high-fiving his mates, shouting “24!” [his score on the On the Piste game], and I thought, “this is good…”. And so I went back in the following week and asked the owner how it was going, and he’d say “40″, and then “60″. And I’m thinking, how are people doing that? And it turns out people are learning how to stop and start [their pee flow] to get higher scores. We’ve got 3 scores so far over 100.

GM: So I don’t think ours will give you a hernia; rather it’d give you the sort of exercise your doctor might give you!

So far I’ve found that I’d need to drink a lot to get the score up to anything respectable. A couple of cups of coffee doesn’t really cut it.

GM: Volume is good! First thing in the morning is tough, but once you break the seal at night… We tend to drink a lot of water so that we can test it out more often.

How many venues have taken it up so far?

GM: Well, we’ve been trying to keep it under the radar, so the plan was always to have this one and then the one in Cambridge. But in the meantime, one way or another, we’ve been approached by a company ­– a big mall in Bristol – and we’re now doing the installation surveys for them. We’ve had quite a lot of interest from the States, but we’ve had to say we’ll come back to them. The plan is, after today, we’ll start to talk to bar chains and exhibition centres. The nice thing about this is it’s quite easy to get people to talk about it.

What games do you currently operate on the system?

MM: On the Piste is, by design, about as simple a game as you can imagine. It has to be. And then there’s my personal favourite [a version of the classic Atari wall-smashing game, Breakout], which we wanted to be as retro as it possible, so that we could demonstrate the concept. Clever Dick is our quiz game: very simple multiple-choice questions and answers. It’s so simple – in fact, we started with three options, but that was too much processing for a man with his willy in his hands. If you have a look at the Clever Dick game, [reading the questions from the screen]: “Two pints of lager would put you over the limit, true or false? Alcohol is a depressant, true or false?” We’re working with Drinkaware. This is an example of gameification, and we’re using that format where the guy is trying for a high score, while we’re putting across a serious message.

What’s the future for this platform?

GM: It’s a little bit further away, but because all the units are linked to the internet, you could have multiplayer games.

What, with men heading to the toilet together for a game?

GM: Well, that already happens. The idea of the “Toilet Party” is something we’ve seen in Cambridge.

Sorry, the “Toilet Party”? 

GM: Well, that’s a phrase I use for when girls all go off together to the toilet in a huddle. It turns out that men were starting to go off in pairs! And the whole urinal etiquette, where men just don’t talk to each other at urinals…we’ve see men queuing up and then looking over each others’ shoulders and saying, “You’ve gotta hit the target!” So the chatter starts there. It’s been interesting.

And people are actually managing to stay within the urinal? The first thing that struck me were potential cleaning costs…

GM: In Cambridge, they’ve told us that there are two things they’ve found there are less of: less mess, which we sort of expected because we tried to design the game so you’re not splashing about, and less vandalism. When we put it in, people thought it’d be [ripped] off the wall within a week, and it’s still there after 4 months. But because people are having a laugh, there’s a lot less vandalism. People tend to get less angry. So, if you put a little bit of thought into the way you design the game, people get better. It rewards aim. And of course you don’t go too far right because you know any minute you’ll have to swing left.