I’m sitting in a house in North London with electrodes attached to my temporal lobes to supposedly learn how to control video games with my mind.
Wait, let me explain. In July, a 20-something Twitch streamer… Perri Karyal She made headlines when she claimed to have defeated two bosses in Elden Ring with thought alone. Cynics being cynical soon took to social media to slam her. “It’s a sham,” posted @gamerguru2924. “What a fraud,” shouted @saucypepperoni. “This is bullshit, why do you idiots believe this?” considered @Pennywyze-ub7ry.
Intrigued but skeptical, I asked my old friend Derren Brown for his opinion. “As a kid, I tried to move a paperclip with the power of my mind,” he said. “It barely moved. I figured that if I couldn’t do it, then chances are no one else could. Telekinesis is the least demonstrated form of psychic ability because it’s pretty unambiguous whether something moves or not. These days it’s hard to get away with pulling a bit of thread or throwing a pen across the room when no one’s looking.” This is clearly a load of nonsense, I thought.
But that being said, technology does It exists to read the electrical activity of the brain. In her videos, Karyal makes it clear that she uses a device to read the signals from her brain. She is not Carrie. So I reached out to her and asked for a demonstration. Surprisingly, she agreed.
“I had used EEG equipment before, but I had no idea you could buy it on the market,” he tells me as he straps an Emotiv Epoc X headset to the back of my neck. Karyal has a masters in psychology and hopes to return for a PhD. “[These]headsets aren’t suitable for medical use, but they can still measure brain activity. I have friends who were researching what happens to the brain when you’re shown particular images, such as a gruesome murder or a couple in love. I really want to try it on while I sleep, but I’m worried about breaking it.” He’s already broken a £1,000 headset, but Emotiv sent him a free replacement and it’s now listed on its website.
This isn’t the first time Karyal has dabbled in applying science to video games. She hooked up a Tens (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit on her arm to a heart rate monitor to play the horror game Visage. “Every time I got scared, my heart rate would go up and I would get electrocuted,” she laughs. “We tried to reduce my stimulus management, so I wouldn’t react as much.” As we get ready, she tells me she’d like to have a robotic arm in the kitchen, “so I could cook by just thinking.” She streams more than just video games, too. “I’m definitely not qualified to give advice,” she adds, but her videos cover topics like why we make mistakes or why anger is good for you. Or you can spend 20 minutes watching her shove the world’s hottest chillies up her nose. I knew there was a reason I liked her.
Back to Elden Ring, my skepticism has turned to absolute terror. Has anyone else tried it? I ask. “I mean, the boyfriend hasn’t tried it yet,” he says. “I think he’s just nervous and thinks if he doesn’t record any brain activity, he’ll be convinced he’s dead.” I worry about the same thing. Or what if Karyal plans to extract my personality, store it on his computer, and then sell it to the highest bidder on the dark web? These things happen, right?
I still don’t understand how it all works, so Karyal does his best to explain. “The headset comes with a brain-computer interface, so I took Emotiv’s API and programmed a way to turn that pattern recognition into input for a virtual Xbox controller,” he says. I nod, but I feel a bit like Homer Simpson when he sets off the lie detector.
Karyal chose Elden Ring because it is “supposed to be one of the hardest games ever.” He has tried it with other games like shooter Valorant and racing game Trackmania. “I tried Tetris, but I couldn’t figure out exactly where I wanted the blocks to go. Party games like Fall Guys and Super Smash Bros worked the best. I managed to mess up a Pikachu with mind control, which was pretty funny. He cried, which was nice.”
To set up a basic control system, you assign four thoughts to each of them, but you can’t just think up, down, left, and/or right, because the thoughts need to be diverse for the computer to distinguish between them. “For running, I imagine pushing a cube,” says Karyal. “For dodging, I imagine spinning a plate to the tune of Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), because I needed something very different than pushing a cube. I had a hard time getting the third and fourth ones right. For six months, nothing worked. Then some PhD students suggested imagining a smell or a sensation. For attack, I imagine a little cricket jumping around and pulsing the muscles in my inner ear. For healing, I imagine getting super tense, hot, and angry.”
Calibrating the device isn’t easy, so I’m just going to try one button: push a cube to attack. After a few firmware updates, colored waves appear on a graph. Yay! I’m not brain dead. I’m taken to a picture of the cube I’m trying to push.
“Imagine pushing a very heavy cube in a straight line,” says Karyal. “If you can match the pattern of brain activity, the cube should start moving.”
“Hnnnnngggh!” I can do this. Use the Force, Rich!
I can’t believe it. As I think about pushing the cube, it moves forward on the screen. We start Elden Ring, and just by thinking about pushing a cube, I can make my character attack. This is incredible… “I’m not blowing smoke up your ass,” Karyal says, “but I’ve never seen anyone do this as fast as you. You must be very special.” That’s like my mother always told me.
Now Karyal shows me how she It does. Using a Tobii eye tracker, you can look at the corners of the screen to move the joystick and tilt your head to move the camera. With some added voice controls (“because sometimes you need to press more than one button, like attacking and jumping”), you can play hands-free.
I ask her if anyone has approached her about patenting her incredible technology. “That’s what bigwigs like Elon Musk are interested in,” she says. “But he probably has something better.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Well, it would work much better if the implants were placed directly into the brain,” he explains, looking at me strangely.
Considerably less skeptical now than when I walked in, I excuse myself and leave.