The Korea Times, by way of Boing Boing, has an article about a company called Xtive that claims to have developed a system of subliminal audio cues designed to combat video game addiction. They claim that the messages are played 10,000 - 20,000 times per second, and that while gamers can not consciously hear the sounds, their subconscious can pick up, and be influenced enough to dissuade people from playing games. The eventual goal of the company is to have game developers integrate their system into gaming machines, to curb the rampant, deadly scourge of video game addiction.
Korea has, in recent years, had a spat of gaming related deaths, most related to people looking to escape reality by spending hours in Internet cafes, until they eventually die of a combination of exhaustion and ramen overdose.
Ignoring the mountains of evidence against the feasibility of subliminal stimuli, one still has to wonder why this company has such a hard-on for pushing people away from video games. Perhaps the CEO was molested by Sonic the Hedgehog, or maybe the President's daughter was kidnapped by a gang of ninjas and no one was a bad enough dude to rescue her. Whatever the case, with products like this, Xtive has cemented their Christmas Party invite from the Thompson family.
Contest:
2:03 AM on 03.17.2007
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I learned that in Psychology, of all places. Why this is relevant at 2 in the morning, I haven't yet discovered.
Besides not being a believer, I've been playing games for way too many years for something like this to convince me otherwise. Having said that, it would save me a load of money.
Glad to see at least one Dtoid writer lived through the night.
If I was a game company why would I want people to not buy my product? I think it is going to be hard to make a company make people NOT like their product.
Now the problems comes to speaker ability as well as the nyquist frequency; if the speakers aren't able to produce the high frequency, then the technology will be wasted. Also, if the sound files aren't constructed with a very very high nyquist frequency cap (96kHz stereo signal can only produce sounds up to 48kHz), then you get (what I'll term for ease of use) "reflection" of the audio frequency, where anything above 48kHz gets reflected down into the audio; very high sounds are interpereted as very low sounds. Speakers nowadays are getting into the 96kHz range for use in in-home systems, and as most developers don't really stray into audio frequencies above 22kHz (though with new speakers this will increase), this technology can exploit the upper frequency band and send out pulses of high frequency and make the player fell ill and want to stop.
Of course, the company might have also just made a high-frequency tone generating box, which would also deter people playing games and escape problems such as integrating it into already in use speakers or technology. In Britain last year some fast food establishments and shops installed high frequency boxes that emitted a very high pitch sound (although within the range of hearing for people under the age of 25) that would deter youth from loitering around the shops, as long exposure makes them feel pain.
Hope that explains some things.