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A friend lamented that he had to play laser tag, a kind of paintball-like game, except with infra-red guns.

“Isn’t that kind of pointless?” I asked. “You need a little pain.”

There’s nothing like the fear of pain to make you act like a combat soldier. Or to wrestle you from ambivalence to rabid competition against your friends. And you can show your battle scars the next day. Kudos!

Ahhh bonding.

Here’s a project, illustrated above, that aims to bond remote people through an exertion interface.

Whole body computing. Fun.

Boxing over a Distance team: Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Matthew Karau, Stefan Agamanolis, Costas Bissas, Cindy Jeffers, Elena Corchero, Richard Wilson, Andrea Taylor, Paula Nichols, Angus Aitken, Tomoko Hayashi, Hilary Grant

Photos from Distance Lab

*under optimal conditions.

This presentation resonated with me. For a harassed mum, FlavourCrusader will be a productivity tool.

For a social foodie/ethical shopper it’s more fun. They’ll be developing food skills; level one is identifying good ingredients by flavour and other properties. Sweet, juicy, crunchy, easy-to-peel etc. There’ll be game mechanics around this.

So it’s like an Alessi kitchen utensil. How you see it depends on how you use it.

Presentation by Sebastian Deterding.

I’ve been looking at motivating behaviour within FlavourCrusader to change behaviour in the real world. Not as radical as this Schell talk, but just about as much fun.