Unsurprisingly, the crowdfunding campaign for the Blood Sport peripheral got suspended a couple of days ago. Kickstarter don't usually disclose their reasons for cancelling a campaign, but it's easy to see why they might have got squeamish about a controller that drew blood from players. Right? It wasn't just some weird kinky and/or gross thing, although raising the stakes by having you shed blood any time you take damage in a game was part of it. The main point of the Blood Sport controller, though, was to coax people who are perhaps a little reluctant to donate blood to do so through playing a couple of rounds of Battlefield, with a pin prick accompanying ever rumble. It worked pretty simply: an Arduino circuit board is placed within a regular gaming controller, activated whenever the rumble feature gets going. Obviously it didn't just draw blood indiscriminately, limiting transfers based on your age, medical conditions and weight. Not wanting to deal with any of the inevitable lawsuits, the Blood Sport team were holding out on actually shipping out controllers to people, opting instead for a cross-country tour which was part tech demo and part blood drive. It's kind of a novel idea, and anything that gets blood donations up is good, but bleeding at the same time as your Call Of Duty character? That's...that's messed up.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
