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.