I am 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, twentysomething Twitch streamer Perri Karyal hit headlines when she claimed to have defeated two bosses in Elden Ring by thought alone. The cynics, being cynics, were soon to call her out on social media. “It’s faked,” posted @gamerguru2924. “What a fraud,” yelled @saucypepperoni. “This is some bullshit, why are you fools believing this?” considered @Pennywyze-ub7ry.
Intrigued yet skeptical, I asked my old pal Derren Brown for his opinion. “As a kid, I tried moving a paper clip with the power of my mind,” he said. “It barely budged. I figure if I can’t do it, then chances are no-one else can. Telekinesis is the least-demonstrated form of psychic ability because it’s pretty unambiguous whether something moves or not. Hard nowadays to get away with yanking a bit of thread or throwing a pen across the room when no one’s looking.” This is clearly a load of baloney, I thought.
But having said that, the technology does exists to read electrical activity in the brain. In her videos, Karyal makes it clear she’s using hardware to read her brain signals. She is not Carrie. So I contacted her and asked for a demonstration. She surprisingly agreed.
“I’d used EEG (electroencephalography) equipment but had no idea you could buy it commercially,” she tells me while strapping an Emotiv Epoc X headset to my bonce. Karyal has an MSc in psychology and is hoping to return to get a doctorate “[These] headsets aren’t fit for medical uses, but can still measure brain activity. I have friends who were investigating what happens to the brain when you’re shown particular images like a horrific murder or a couple in love. I really want try it on while I’m asleep, but I’m worried I’ll break it.” She has already broken one £1,000 headset, but Emotiv sent her a free replacement and she now appears on their website.
This isn’t Karyal’s first foray into applying science to video games. She’s connected a Tens (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit on her arm to a heart rate monitor to play horror game, Visage. “Every time I got scared, my heart rate would increase and I’d get zapped,” she laughs. “We tried to reduce my stimulus management, so I wouldn’t react so much.” While we’re getting set up, she tells me she’d like to have a robot arm in the kitchen, “to do the cooking just by thinking.” She also streams more than video games. “I’m definitely not qualified to give advice,” she adds, but her videos discuss topics such as why we make mistakes or why rage is good for you. Or you can spend 20 minutes watching her put the world’s hottest chillies up her nose. I knew there was a reason I liked her.
Back to Elden Ring, my scepticism has turned to abject terror. Has anyone else had a go, I ask? “I mean, the boyfriend still hasn’t tried it,” she says. “I think he’s nervous and thinks if it doesn’t register any brain activity at all, he’ll be convinced he’s dead.” I worry the same. Or what if Karyal plans to suck out my personality, store it on her computer then sell it to the highest bidder on the dark web? That stuff happens, right?
I’m still confused how it all works, so Karyal does her best to explain. “The headset comes with a brain-computer interface so I took the Emotiv API and programmed a way to turn that recognition of pattern into an input for a virtual Xbox controller,” she says. I nod along but it feels a bit like when Homer Simpson blows up the lie detector.
Karyal chose Elden Ring because, “it’s supposed to be one of the hardest games ever”. She’s tested it with other games like shooter Valorant and racing game Trackmania. “I tried Tetris but it couldn’t figure out where exactly 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 fun. He cried, which was nice.”
To set up a basic control system, four thoughts are each assigned a button. But you can’t just think about up, down, left and/or right as your thoughts need to be diverse for the equipment to distinguish them. “To sprint, I imagine pushing a cube,” says Karyal. “To dodge, I imagine spinning a plate to You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive because I needed something very different from pushing a cube. I struggled to get the third and fourth. For six months, nothing worked. Then some PhD students suggested imagining a smell or sensation. To attack, I imagine a little cricket hopping and pulse my inner ear muscles. To heal, I imagining getting super tense, hot and angry.”
Calibrating the equipment isn’t easy, so I’m only going to try one think button – pushing a cube to attack. After some firmware updates, coloured waves appear on a graph. Yes! I’m not brain dead. I’m taken to a picture of the cube I’m trying to push.
“Just imagine pushing a cube that’s super heavy in a straight line,” says Karyal. “If you can match the pattern of brain activity, the cube should start to move.”
“Hnnnnngggh!” I can do this. Use the Force, Rich!
I can’t believe it. As I think about pushing the cube, the cube moves forward on the screen. We fire up Elden Ring and, just by thinking about pushing a cube, I can get my character to attack. This is amazing … “I’m not just blowing smoke up your arse,” says Karyal, “but I’ve never seen anyone do this as fast as you. You must be very special.” It’s just like my mum always told me.
Now Karyal shows me how she does it. By using a Tobii eye tracker, she can look at corners of the screen to move the joystick and tilt her head to move the camera. With some extra voice controls (“because you sometimes need to press more than one button, like attack and jump,”) she can play entirely hands free.
I ask if anyone has been in touch to patent her amazing technological set-up. “It’s what all the big boys like Elon Musk are into,” she says. “But he’s probably got something better.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Well, it would work much better if you had implants directly into the brain,” she explains, looking at me weirdly.
Considerably less skeptical now than when I walked in, I make my excuses and leave.