Toylets flushed with success
22nd January 2011
From the “next big thing” file, here is the background story to Sega’s latest gaming sensation, Toylets. If you missed the headline earlier this week, Toylets is a suite of new digital games played not with console, toggles or fingers, but with – urine! (no, we’re not taking the piss).
Sega has installed the games in gents’ conveniences in a small range of bars and subway stations across Japan (where else?). Games are played by directing the urine stream onto a sensor placed in the bowl or urinal and following the action on a small gaming screen placed at eye level.
Happy splashers can choose from four games. Mannequin Pis measures and records volume and flow rate; Graffiti Eraser (the fire fighter’s friend) tests control and conservation as you spray the screen clean of graffiti; Splashing Battle challenges the user to out-perform the previous pee-er; and North Wind transforms the flow into a wind blowing up a young woman’s skirt – the stronger the flow, the further the skirt rises.
Does this all sound horribly like little boys and toilets? Yes! But there is a cold commercial reality. The intention apparently is not to reduce splash, improve hygiene or even foster a sense of self-worth, but to hold the urinator’s attention to the advertising stripped across the screen. So, while relieving your bladder of the residue of many pints of beer you may be exhorted to go straight back and consume even more, a circular dance of ever-increasing consumption and expiation.
In a cunning commercial tease Sega claims to have no intention of marketing Toylets beyond the current small scale trial, which means they’ll be everywhere in six months. And you can bet they are already working on Toylets2, 3 and 4, with endless ideas for extending and expanding the original tool – I mean, game. How about a dual sensor: pee with a friend for truly interactive satisfaction. Or hands-free: the ultimate test of poise and shoe leather.
Inevitably we will see a gaming version of the old school boy favourites, height and distance. Like a fairground strongman the urinator will be challenged to ring a bell by peeing to the highest mark on the urinal or by hitting the sensor from the greatest distance.
Public toilets will become vast gaming arcades, complete with hostesses pushing drinks trolleys so players can maintain output without leaving their play station. Champions will emerge, local leagues appear, and eventual Olympic status is assured (with the advantage of instant urine samples to combat doping).
But wait! Is Toylets to be confined to males? Is this to be a rare case of anatomy over-riding equity? With vast advertising revenues at stake you can be assured that the smarts at Sega are working on this problem right now. There are certain physiological challenges to overcome for women to play while they pee (so to speak).
Forget the notorious She-Pee, that sloppy piece of hardware designed to allow a woman to urinate in a standing position. The women I know who have tried a She-Pee say it’s a plumber’s nightmare.
My bet is that Sega will go for a maneuverable toilet seat, a sort of hollow ouija board fitted atop the regular seat that allows the sitter to slide around and direct the flow onto sensors in the bowl. Alternatively women may sit astride hollowed out computer chairs and scoot around large splash pans.
However Toylets develop you can be sure that public conveniences will never be the same – and you read it here first.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Who will be Ashburtonian of the Year?
6th January 2011
Before we consign 2010 to the dustbin of history let us reflect for a moment on the nominations for Ashburtonian of the Year. At the time of writing there are just two.
The first is the group from the District Council that has fulfilled the dream of a new industrial park to service our growing economy. These visionary men, giants of industry and commerce, have brought forth the Ashburton Business Estate from a scrubby paddock at the north end of town.
I had my first close look at the Business Estate this week in the company of my friend from Gordon’s Road and Portia, a young Doberman bitch. Portia’s excitement was palpable as we strolled down Bremner’s Road. Muscles quivering, she snuffed the warm evening air until my friend unleashed her, whereupon she shot like a bullet from a gun into the gathering dusk. It was then, as I lifted my eyes to follow her track, that I was struck by the full magnificence of the Business Estate.
Like a scene from a Cold War novel the Estate is a picture of near-perfect apocalypsis: pristine roadways, elegant kerbs and channels, streetlamps – even surveillance cameras – all curve away across an expanse of fine rippling grass towards a golden horizon unmarred by single structure. The silence is palpable: somewhere a tumbleweed blows.
Surmounting an elegantly formed embankment planted with many hundreds of small native trees, my friend and I gazed across this $20million ratepayer investment and marvelled at the vision of its creators.
“I was agin it,” my friend confided. “I thought it would be noisy and disruptive but now I see what they were really doing I think it’s brilliant. Overnight they’ve given me an 85ha dog park; I’m even thinking of bringing the horse down here for a bit of exercise.”
But we should not judge the achievement of the Business Estate’s creators simply by the earthworks. The genius is in the marketing. Even now some of Ashburton’s brainiest are fanning out across Canterbury to lure industry away from competitors like Rolleston’s I-Site or the new Dakota Park estate at Christchurch airport.
The Business Estate’s website is breathless with excitement at the inventory of companies that have almost signed up, attracted by global transport links and the nifty begonia beds that provide such a warm welcome.
By comparison the second nomination for Ashburtonian of the Year is, frankly, an embarrassment. It is the colony of black-billed gulls nesting in the Ashburton river bed. Apart from the obvious fact that a group of migratory birds can hardly claim status as true Ashburtonians there is no merit in the irresponsible behaviour of creatures that raise their offspring standing in a gravel bed up to their backsides in dirty water.
It is preposterous to contemplate that a gaggle of seabirds may attain the cover-girl status of Ashburtonian of the Year when they possess neither the vision nor the ratepayer resources of the creators of the Business Estate.
It has been suggested to me that our town is privileged to host the black-billed gulls, that we should embrace these rare birds as an icon for the district. I say how will our town slogan – It Just Keeps Getting Better – appear to the tourist or business investor driving across the Ashburton bridge into a shower of bird shit?
So the Ashburtonian of the Year is a stark choice between the gulls of the river bed and the giants of the Business Estate. The winner will have a statue erected in their honour. What will it be, a great white seagull at the south end of town or a great white elephant at the north?
6th January 2011
Before we consign 2010 to the dustbin of history let us reflect for a moment on the nominations for Ashburtonian of the Year. At the time of writing there are just two.
The first is the group from the District Council that has fulfilled the dream of a new industrial park to service our growing economy. These visionary men, giants of industry and commerce, have brought forth the Ashburton Business Estate from a scrubby paddock at the north end of town.
I had my first close look at the Business Estate this week in the company of my friend from Gordon’s Road and Portia, a young Doberman bitch. Portia’s excitement was palpable as we strolled down Bremner’s Road. Muscles quivering, she snuffed the warm evening air until my friend unleashed her, whereupon she shot like a bullet from a gun into the gathering dusk. It was then, as I lifted my eyes to follow her track, that I was struck by the full magnificence of the Business Estate.
Like a scene from a Cold War novel the Estate is a picture of near-perfect apocalypsis: pristine roadways, elegant kerbs and channels, streetlamps – even surveillance cameras – all curve away across an expanse of fine rippling grass towards a golden horizon unmarred by single structure. The silence is palpable: somewhere a tumbleweed blows.
Surmounting an elegantly formed embankment planted with many hundreds of small native trees, my friend and I gazed across this $20million ratepayer investment and marvelled at the vision of its creators.
“I was agin it,” my friend confided. “I thought it would be noisy and disruptive but now I see what they were really doing I think it’s brilliant. Overnight they’ve given me an 85ha dog park; I’m even thinking of bringing the horse down here for a bit of exercise.”
But we should not judge the achievement of the Business Estate’s creators simply by the earthworks. The genius is in the marketing. Even now some of Ashburton’s brainiest are fanning out across Canterbury to lure industry away from competitors like Rolleston’s I-Site or the new Dakota Park estate at Christchurch airport.
The Business Estate’s website is breathless with excitement at the inventory of companies that have almost signed up, attracted by global transport links and the nifty begonia beds that provide such a warm welcome.
By comparison the second nomination for Ashburtonian of the Year is, frankly, an embarrassment. It is the colony of black-billed gulls nesting in the Ashburton river bed. Apart from the obvious fact that a group of migratory birds can hardly claim status as true Ashburtonians there is no merit in the irresponsible behaviour of creatures that raise their offspring standing in a gravel bed up to their backsides in dirty water.
It is preposterous to contemplate that a gaggle of seabirds may attain the cover-girl status of Ashburtonian of the Year when they possess neither the vision nor the ratepayer resources of the creators of the Business Estate.
It has been suggested to me that our town is privileged to host the black-billed gulls, that we should embrace these rare birds as an icon for the district. I say how will our town slogan – It Just Keeps Getting Better – appear to the tourist or business investor driving across the Ashburton bridge into a shower of bird shit?
So the Ashburtonian of the Year is a stark choice between the gulls of the river bed and the giants of the Business Estate. The winner will have a statue erected in their honour. What will it be, a great white seagull at the south end of town or a great white elephant at the north?
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