Pill game

Here at the SIGCHI 2019 conference in Glasgow there is a wondrous diversity of paper presentations. Perhaps the most surprising one I attended was during a session on original interfaces for multimedia games. For this paper, the presenter explained their game via a short video.

The video starts at the outset of the game, when the player swallows a little pill. This pill contains a temperature sensor and a tiny bluetooth transmitter. There is an app on the player’s smartphone that shows the current temperature of the pill.

The goal of the game is to maintain the pill at a target temperature. At first, when the pill is in the player’s stomach, the game is pretty easy. The player just needs to drink the proper amount of hot fluids. At this point the video shows people drinking coffee and hot soup.

But then, when the pill arrives at the player’s small intestine, the game becomes more challenging. In order to maintain the proper temperature, the player needs to exercise, which raises body temperature just the right amount.

At this point the video shows people running down hallways within office buildings, while checking their phones to see whether they have hit their target temperature.

The narration then helpfully explains that part of the fun of the game is that you don’t know exactly when it will end, although generally the game ends after somewhere between 24 and 36 hours.

At this point in the video, we just see a discreet shot of the door of a bathroom, and we hear a flushing sound.

I think this is a wonderful paper. For one thing, it totally gives me permission to submit my most outrageous ideas to SIGCHI 2020. After all, I’m pretty sure that nothing I come up with will top what I saw today.