Vampire video game draws real blood from players
Mon 24 Nov 2014
A new videogame innovation aims to actually draw real blood from gamers when they are shot or injured whilst playing characters in their favourite videogames. Blood Sport is a Kickstarter project which provides an interface between the ‘rumble’ feature of the controller in major consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation and the same kind of blood collection machine found in blood banks. When in-game injury occurs and sets off the rumble action, the blood collection machine kicks into action and draws some of your blood.
There’s no actual bare-metal innovation in the project, which is the brainchild of writer and videogame developer Taran Chadha and copywriter Jamie Umpherson; Blood Sport simply interfaces between the rumble feature and the collection machine via an Arduino Board, an interactive single-board microcontroller designed to facilitate interactive environments based on real-world input.
![bloodsport-controller-arduino-1[1]](https://thestack.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/bloodsport-controller-arduino-11.jpg)
![bloodsport-controller-arduino-x2[1]](https://thestack.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/bloodsport-controller-arduino-x21.jpg)
The project is being developed pro bono by Chadha and Umpherson, with the aim of launching a gaming tour of Canadian blood banks in March of next year, to synchronise with the launch of the much-anticipated Battlefield: Hardline from Visceral and EA.
Anyone who actually ends up playing the game will be doing so with authorised equipment and under the supervision of trained medical staff. The ‘Nationwide Blood Sport’ tour that the pair propose to launch in Toronto will require the development of a two-player version of the kit – at the moment it is single-player only – so that a genuine non-AI tournament will be possible. The KickStarter goal for Blood Sport’s development and for the tour is CAD $250,000, of which the current tally stands at just under $4000, with 38 backers.
Participating players will need to initially submit their age, weight and information about any pre-existing medical conditions in order to be allowed to participate. The developers comment that they are “not reinventing the wheel. All we’re doing is hacking a pre-existing blood collection machine to take your gaming experience to the next level.”
Kickstarter: Blood Sport [VIDEO]
