PainStation | Hacker News Reader

PainStation

en.wikipedia.org

213 pointsTomte58 comments

I won a game on that machine at the gamecon in Leipzig, probably 15 years ago.

I got a blister from the heat, went to the first aid area to get something for it and they shut it down after.

Fun times

They should have used the thermal grill illusion instead of real heat

Amazing, I had no idea illusory pain existed. I've actually been looking for a safe way to induce pain, and this seems promising. I would have thought the BDSM community would make use of this, but a quick googling doesn't turn up any products. Any idea why?

You can try Raytheon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

A notorious local dominatrix revealed many years ago the trick of "burning" her customers with a clothes iron stored in the refrigerator.

How about capsaicin induced pain? That should be very safe as long as you don't go crazy with the most extreme peppers/extractions.

Hypnosis community engages in all sorts of sense creation through hypnosis.

Makes me think of the Dune pain box.

gom jabbar

The Gom Jabbar was the poisoned needle held at Paul's neck. The box, if I recall, had no name and was only a vehicle for the perceived pain delivered to Paul's hand.

Mmm, seems like I need to read it a third time. Thanks for pointing that out!

I remember playing this like 15y ago or so as well but at a Pong exhibition in Bern (Switzerland), strangely that is not listed on the Wikipedia page.

The worst thing, at least for me, was was the whip, the heat was very toned down when I played it.

I played this with a friend at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin.

I felt really bad, they were so bad I kept winning, and their hand’s skin cracked bloodily and got bruised after a session. But they insisted to finish the game.

Sounds unhygienic. Is the punishment a blood pathogen from the previous loser?

The silicon whip, which is the main pain-inducing device (the heat is laughable, and the electric shocks are painful but don't do permanent damage) was changed against a new one and disinfected before being re-used by the next player.

At least that's how it was managed at the two events where I had some fun with that thing, the Computerspielemuseum Berlin and a Chaos Communication Congress (back in the days when it was still at BCC).

Or a DNA fragment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555655

> and their hand’s skin cracked bloodily and got bruised after a session. But they insisted to finish the game.

This arcade machine would be a great hit at BDSM parties I bet.

My understanding is that's partly how it got started (basically in a BDSM-influenced artistic context)

The linked article says it has been used in that specific context.

Played the very same! The knob-steering made it hard enough for even the gamers among my friends, so we all felt the pain! IIRC some ”powerups” such as ”pain x2” started dropping after a while. Hilarious stuff.

Wife and I were there recently and I wanted to play but couldn’t convince her. Sad times, lol

It's 2024, and I've yet to see anyone implement Domination from Never Say Never Again (mentioned in the Wikipedia page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY

The thing is (as amusing as it would be to see a real version, maybe at a James Bond fan convention), the game as a game doesn't seem that interesting. The setup showing the globe and the game picking a country sounds like it would be a strategy game of some sort, but the game play seems to be (minus the shocks) a fairly simple game of hand-eye coordination, despite the hologram, actually less sophisticated than many real video games of the era (1983).

Pair it up with Atari Tempest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiTgA3ZOoSo

And Nuke 'em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYGa9KZOy7c

The PainStation runs Windows XP because of course it does - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31736623 - June 2022 (1 comment)

Here's the thing in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bm7fLcj5UI

I wrote a script that shocks the user with a Pavlok (https://shop.pavlok.com/pages/pavlok-homepage/) whenever they die in Counter-Strike :)

care to share? i could not get the oauth dance to work with their api

Yes of course: https://github.com/ayancey/ZeusIRL

I modified code from this repo: https://github.com/ztrayl3/PyPav2

The oAuth API sucks. These people managed to reverse engineer the BLE communications, and I slightly modified it to work for the newer Pavlok 3.

Thank you so much!

This (or, PainStation v2) visited the student union at Abertay University a good 15 or so years ago. I played it on many occasion.

One aftertnoon I played with a particularly competitive friend of mine. I am also competitive. The game went on far longer than it should have, and I ended up with some pretty painful burns on the bottom of my hand and a large welt on top of it. I also had twinges in my arm for several hours afterwards.

Was a great time, highly recommended.

I played it a the computer games museum in Berlin a few years ago. It was a very fun experience. I battled my wife who jumped when the first eletric shock hit here :D and lost afterwards against an employee there, who was quite resistant to any damage ;) He also showed us the first aid section next to the machine.

For everyone having the chance to play with it: do it :)

This reminds of "Shock Tanks" my brother and I used to have. The concept is pretty simple, your RC tank get 3 lives per round, if it gets hit you get shocked.

Great memories. All females around us (wife, sister, mother) hated those toys and my wife was really happy when she heard that one of the tanks broke.

In the good ole days, we did something similar with ungrounded outlets and metal cases.

For all the rounds of work on "Virtual Reality;" so very few have worked on simulating anything but the pleasant sensations. Its as if people are imagining a world with no negative feedback.

If pain couldn't be pleasant, there would not be BDSM or mexican food.

Also, some racing simulator have reached a point where you take a beating racing a rally stage. Maybe not to the point you are feeling pain but you don't really come out of them relaxed.

spoken like a true cenobite

The box. You opened it, we came.

I guess I have a new "what do x and y have in common?" joke.

I'll second the rally simulator comment. I played one at some arcade in Chicago a few times and couldn't sleep that night. Those things get your adrenaline going.

I don't remember where but I once read a blog article about non-gamers who are introduced to Skyrim for the first time and recall one player accidentally killing an important NPC and not having any saves to reload, and felt strong emotions over virtually losing someone they knew.

I think some players of games (or watchers of movies, etc.) are more sensitive to that kind of "pain" than others. Sometimes I think they might feel as exhausted as their character after pushing through an entire fighting tournament with their avatar, as they were also kicked around in a sense.

Games with an element of pain have a long tradition.

Me and my classmates used to play “who can hold the scalding hot pipe the longest”.

Earlier there was snap-dragon, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap-dragon_(game) and many, many more.

I played it at the Computerspiele-Museum in Berlin. The whip is really painful over time, the rest isn‘t.

There's also Tekken Torture Tournament

https://eddostern.com/works/tekken-torture-tournament/

Waiting for the PainStation Portable.

>No matter the score, the first player to remove his or her hand from the PEU device loses the game.

The winner, of course, has passed the test of the Gom Jabbar and qualifies as human.

Ten years ago, I played it against my girlfriend at the time at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin. Good way to raise the heat for whatever you're doing after that.

There was an old pulpy SF novel named Killobyte(sic) with the premis being a VR that gave increasingly (with each death) intense electric shocks as for death to increase the realism. MC was someone who didn't read the warning labels and has a pacemaker. If they die the third time it will potentially damage their pacemaker and kill them.

another commenter mentioned it, wonder why they went with real pain instead of the less messy simulation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_grill_illusion

maybe they tried it and learned it can be beaten?

I can't believe it's not pain™

I think it's on purpose, there're comments in this thread saying that its whip can even make you bleed.

Ah, I actually played on this one multiple times in Berlin, at the video game museum. It’s quite fun.

They should have allowed blood sacrifice.

An equal opportunity version of pay to win.

tried this out last year at the computer game museum and it is definitively very much fun to play, even if you're worse at pong than your enemy you might win if the enemy receives the pain by surprise. i also received some minor skin damage by the whipping onto my hand

This reminds me of the ergonomics of the original grizzly-bear sized Xbox controllers. Ah, nostalgia!

Shocking games were popular in the 1920s. Fairly intense. High voltage low amps.

I played this a few years ago, it was awesome

This is Burning Man level stuff...

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