Getting hurt in video games will literally take the blood out of you

For starters, how good are you at video games? If the answer is ‘not that good’, then you’d probably be the ideal donor in a unique KickStarter campaign that presents a twisted game called Blood Sport, which will literally take the life out of you… Well, the blood to be more specific. This idea was first introduced at KickStarter by a group of well-intentioned game developers aiming to raise $250.000 CAD in order to create a multi-player gaming system in which the players’ blood will be drawn intravenously from their arms every time they got hurt while playing the game. Talking about playing video games on high stakes… This certainly beats late nights spent with the fellas playing FIFA or Mortal Kombat for money.

Perhaps this idea might strike you as insane and the persons behind it would have been looked at as individuals with a few screws loose to their upper deck, but actually the intentions of these young developers was truly noble. The idea is quite simple and reminiscent of the old Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak, which was a device that connected with the N64 controller and emitted basic electrical signals to indicate when players took damage in video games. This function is now built into most of today’s gamepads. Well, the Blood Sport team employed the same electrical signal for their project and transformed it into a blood collection system by using an Arduino board. The main goal of this project was to crowdfund a multi-player unit that could be moved around across Canada to encourage blood donation.

Although this was a truly great and noble idea, KickStarter felt otherwise. The Blood Sport campaign kicked off on November 18th and only managed to raise $3.390 CAD before being dropped on November 24th. KickStarter refused to give further explanations as to why the campaign was dropped, but the phrase “too risky to see through” comes to mind. Nevertheless, hats off to the people who came up with this idea and thought about the Canadian citizens who were in real need of blood donations.