June 23, 2005

Wild Divine

Filed under: General,Technology — mmrobins @ 10:21 pm

After coming home from Kripalu I was reading a magazine on the plane and there was a cool ‘video game’ in an add. It’s called The Journey to Wild Divine, and is played using biofeedback sensors that measure your heart rate variability and skin conductance. It can measure how relaxed or tense you are, so it especially appealed to me after being at Kripalu. I’ve been playing it for a while now and it’s definitely very cool. The plot of the game is a little weird sometimes, but it’s extremely cool to see a video game react to your breathing and stress level. For example, there’s an elevator and if you flex your muscles and shout it goes up, while if you breath deeply and relax it goes down. One of the weirdest parts is a section where two people are involved, each person with a finger in the sensors, and it tells you to hold hands. If you let go of each other’s hands the game recognizes it and tells you. The gameplay is like Myst, with static predrawn scenes that have one or two interactive pieces you can click on. The music is nice and relaxing, but nothing I would listen to on my own. There’s definitely some hard parts too. Some of the challenges require you to be very relaxed, and it definitely takes some practice unless you’re already really good at meditation. Of course, it’s a bit expensive, and they want to sell you all sorts of expansions, but it’s novel enough that I can understand the price. It’s about time video games did something different like this.

2 Comments »

  1. That sounds pretty cool. Where have you been playing it? Did you buy it?

    Comment by Brian Alexander — June 27, 2005 @ 9:52 pm

  2. Yeah, I bought it, so if you want to try it sometime remind me when you’re over.

    Comment by Matt — June 28, 2005 @ 3:36 pm

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