Phonogram to brainwash addiction out of Korean gamers?
By Jeannie Choe 
posted March 15th 2007 12:36AM
posted March 15th 2007 12:36AM
Young gamers in Korea have turned from national phenomena to national concern -- some have actually managed to "game" themselves to death, while blank stares and friendlessness are more common occurrences among the obsessed. Attempting to flip the switch on this unfortunate outcome of pwning, Venture start-up Xtive proposes to subliminally convince these kids to kick the habit by exposing them to an inaudible repetitive message. "We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second," explains Yun Yun-hae, president of Xtive. (Isn't that a little, um, fast?) The company has applied for a domestic patent and plans to commercialize the phonogram in cahoots with the government and game companies, which he hopes will incorporate triggers for the phonograms after games are played for a certain amount of time. Xtive also hopes to move beyond this application, applying their technology to other areas; Yun creepily tops it all off by adding, "We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential." You want to talk about video game zombies? Here we go.[Via Joystiq]
Quackery - give me a break.
What's up with all these Asian youth addicted to online gaming? Guess it beats our drug and gang problems here in the states!
"We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second"
So stupid...words...escape rationality...
Inaudible is right, at 10-20k times per second it will just be a hum and the message won't get across. But I'm sure a constant humming will annoy people off the game. If they really wanted to get people off the game, all they'd need to do is set up a sudden ramp in difficulty, as is common with arcade games.
An attempt at subliminal messaging? Fact is subliminal messages dont really have long lasting effects. Studies on subliminal messaging shows a subtle change in temperment but it doesnt make you actually do anything.
so what is keeping average joe from recording his own voice saying "stop playing" and then condensing it down to a single bit of audio and putting it on loop?
If I wanted to listen to indecipherable gibberish while playing games I would turn on mtv
I smell a new Justin Timerlake song...
"Stop playing" 10,000 times PER SECOND, while Justin goes "Ooo". Annoying, yet extremely catchy. It's genius! Almost too genius...
Methinks the Robots which we all fear will come (that are really already here, and have been conspiring against us for years) will release this to the public as final form of mind control - to make us toil in their underground mines, digging forever for their precious Hi-K materials... We're down to the wire, people... It's zero hour.
With that kind of writing, I could work for EnGadget ;)
WHAT? THAT'S CRAZY!!!
gaming isnt bad, as long as u dont abuse it, no offense to anyone who plays WoW 24/7 :-).
This whole speed-attributed sublimation applies only to optical utilizations... the human ears just dont work that way. You CAN get into the subliminal by showing 1/30th of a second of "STOP PLAYING THIS GAME," but by playing an audio recording of it compressed 30-40,000 times (2 seconds * 10,000 or 20,000 repetitions), only garbled junk or a wave above the hearing frequency ( > 20 kHz) is played... hope that made at least a little bit of sense.
"Young gamers" gaming themselves to death. A tragic situation which begs the question - where are the parents?
When did parenting become mandated to government and industry?
``Experiences tell us kids or adolescents simply don’t stop playing games when faced with forceful measures. Such attempts can also cause many side effects,’’
..ahh.. right..
I like that little picture though, it seems to say "If you don't stop playing, the ninja will kill you" :)
Why not simply solve the problem by using model to lure the gamers away?
i've someone literally played online game straight 27 hours without eating or sleeping then took 1hr break and continued playing it.
10-20,000 times per second? Maybe there was a mistranslation and it should have been that the messages were played at a higher frequency, normal speed but at 10-20khz.
Just go ahead and cite the well controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals showing the effectiveness of your techniques and we've got ourselves a perfect solution. {To all the slow people out there, that was sarcasm}