Did you spend more time last month with Andrew Ryan than your gal Jenny? Have you been playing the Quake Wars demo more than playing with sweet Billy? Seriously folks, how is your significant other dealing with your constant need to prove your hardcore status? If your pixel interactions are a problem, never fear – Massage Me is here.
Massage who? Whoever isn’t racking up the points, is who. Massage Me functions as a universal game controller that your partner in crime wears like a suit. You, intrepid gamer that you are, plug in your controller to the suit and starts furiously mashing “B” … err, your friend’s shoulder. And it works, apparently.
The creators of this DIY-wonder are Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi. They explain the rationale for the suit on their website:
Because giving a massage can be a boring and rather tedious task, the interface simultaneously acts a game controller which motivates the masseur by involving him in game play. … Otherwise wasted button-pushing energy is transformed into a massage and the addicted game player becomes an inexhaustible masseur.
Although not yet commercially available, to those with mild engineering know-how it should be no thing to construct the suit from the detailed instructions.
This is not the first peripheral offering mutual pleasure for gamer and non-gamer alike. The most famous example of these devices was a vibrator manufactured by Sony, for use with one of their early PS2 titles, Rez.
