 Good morning, everyone. Thank you for getting up so early to see me. I am Neon Rain. This is actually not Julian. This is Joe Grant, the amazing one and only Joe Grant. You see, as usual with DEF CON, there always comes some problems. My biofeedback device is actually being held at customs because heart rate monitors equal terrorism. So I actually do not have the device today to be able to show you biotetrus. And unfortunately, without the heart rate monitor, biotetrus is kind of just tetris. So if you wanted to get up and walk out the door, I entirely understand because I do not have my demo. I can tell you how super cool it is and it's so cool. And if I can get the device, they say it's supposed to be coming at some point before the end of CON. I will try to put up flyers or something and say, please come play biotetrus with me. But I don't have the device, so there will not be a demo. So don't throw stuff at me. Please don't hate me. It's not my fault. But there is a link to the source code, right? We do have the source code. We definitely, we do have that. Unfortunately, we don't have the device to show you, but I do have the source code. And I can explain the device and stuff that we were using. So is it OK if I go on? Are you guys OK with that? There's still really cool information here. Yeah, I wasn't going to speak, but Joe was like, and I'm sure you guys all know Joe Grant. He designed those amazing badges you're wearing, everybody. I'm lucky enough to be able to call him my friend. So when I told him that I wasn't going to speak, because I didn't have the device, he was like, you're speaking. If I have to be there. So you guys get to see a special surprise performance from Joe. Nobody really knows. He's here right now. Except for you guys. So you guys be like, yeah, I totally got to see Joe Grant. Suckers. And I'm going to just go along with the slides that Julian wrote and try to make stuff up. Yeah, basically we're going to do a little dance. And hopefully you guys will like that. So basically that's what we're going to do. Hopefully for next year I will be able to have it or something. So I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I'm Canadian. I'm so, so sorry. Because if we didn't have it, like if I would have been from this country, it probably wouldn't have been half the amount of problems. I'm Canadian. I have to apologize for being Canadian. We love you anyway. Thank you. Thank you. So I guess I will at least tell you about the human brain. So we can totally start with that. So I will tell you about how I got into, everyone always says, how on earth did you get into neuroscience? And it's a very, very good question. Because I don't know if you notice, I don't look like the average scientist. What happened is I actually have an anxiety disorder that is not treated by chemicals. There's no pharmaceuticals that can help me. So you can only imagine how scared to death I am of you guys right now. So what happened is being born and bred a hacker and a do-it-yourselfer, what I said was, well, I don't need you. I will come up with a way to figure out how to fix myself. And that's basically how I started out doing this. And as far as I know, the only person at DEF CON that's silly enough to actually go this way. I have no education because I have an anxiety disorder. I can't go to school. And I have not hold down a job for a long period of time. But I have come up with a lot of super cool things because I have a lot of time on my hands. So hopefully you'll still consider it cool, even though we're missing the most essential part of my talk. So basically what we're going to go through is we're going to go through the Brain 101, the video game myths, the history of game peripherals, which I'm really excited about that Joe is doing it. Because if I was doing it, I'd be totally screwed. But Joe remembers all this as well. Old guard, that's the thing about being old guard, you're old. I'm not that old. Sometimes I feel that way, though. So then we'll quickly go through industry current trends and the proposal, and I don't have the demonstration. So this is your Brain 101, or all the stuff you forgot from Cyclase. So let's face it, unless you're really into neuroscience, learning about the human brain can be a complete and utter bore. So what I decided to do this year is I'm just going to simplify everything. We're going to throw away all the jargon. We're going to throw away all the diagrams. We're going to forget all those kooky Latin names because people have explained to me they just don't find that fun. So we're going to cover all the questions that a lot of people come up and they ask me about the brain, and there are quite a few. So this will be your FAQ on the human brain, that wild and crazy organ, your own personal three pound universe. So what is the brain? So on an elemental level, the brain is a continuously changing collection of cells that are gathered together in one place to make it easier to communicate with each other. Neurons are the cells in the brain that allow you to do such things as think, move, feel, and sense things around you. Neurons pass information to each other using electrical and chemical signals. The amount of cells in your brain can be as sprinkling like you'll find in simple vertebrae or found in the billions as in the human brain. How are memories stored in the human brain? Understanding how memories are stored is an essential step in understanding ourselves. What we call memory is simply the way we store and recall things we've experienced with our bodies. Your memory is your brain filing system, but we are so much more than a huge collection of sensation and images and words. Our brain holds everything we've learned, but because experiences can be so varied from one person to another, it's our memories that give our life cohesion, and it's what truly makes us unique. How does the human brain think and solve problems? Think of neurons as multi-armed creatures, like starfish, but they don't touch one another and they come in many different shapes and sizes. Now imagine this multi-armed starfish has a little tiny battery in it, and when the tiny battery is activated, an electrical impulse passes through the multi-armed creature until it reaches the gap between it and its nearest neighbor. Chemicals then cause a bridge in order to allow the electrical impulse to cross and trigger the battery in its neighbor. And does this domino effect is that how neurons allow us to think? Now solving problems can happen in two different ways. It can be a type of thought or calculation, pulling information from memory, filtering new information, and then combining it all and weighing up our alternatives. But you can also make decisions with a primitive emotional part of your brain, and that's what we call a gut instinct. We usually use both of these ways in tandem to come up with our best problem solving. Am I so nervous? Why do we dream? I always find this one so interesting. You may be surprised to hear this, but there is no proven reason why we dream, and if dreaming at all serves any importance at all, there's many modern theories about why we dream, but the understanding about anything to do with dreams is still completely incomplete. We know for sure that we do dream, and we know that some animals that have the same sleep cycles as us dream as well. Dreams once were only thought to occur during a stage called REM sleep, I'm sure you've all heard of it, but we now know that they also occur at a lesser extent in non-REM sleep as well. REM sleep dreams are the ones you usually have that are bizarre and like you're being chased by zombies and tutus, and when you try to explain them in the morning, everybody just thinks you're kind of crazy, so that's generally your REM dreams. And non-REM dreams are the ones that you get that are very repetitive and thought like, the ones that have very little imagery, usually you kind of get them before you're kind of falling asleep when you're torturing yourself by reliving your day, and all these things you should have said to one person or another, so those are your non-REM ones. But it could be completely possible that there's not a time that we are asleep that you're not having some sort of dream of some sort. What's really intriguing about REM sleep is the fact that the brain chemistry in your brain is completely different than it is when you're in a waking state, but when you're sleeping, the electrical energy is exactly the same. Your chemistry changes because it's what helps you stay in one place and it's what triggers things in your mind, so if you're dreaming about fighting things in your sleep, you don't fight. It's why drugs like Ambien have a problem because they do cause you to sleep, but they don't turn off that little switch that causes you not to move. So what's also interesting in non-REM sleep is where all the snoring and the sleepwalking happens. You won't necessarily get that in REM sleep unless it's unusual or chemically produced. It's easy to fall into the belief that since we dream and since we have REM sleep, it's very, very important, but a lot of people don't realize that there's a lot of people who don't get REM sleep. A lot of major depression drugs take away REM sleep, so these people will not have REM sleep for over a period of years. And they don't suffer any damaging effects. So at present, we know that we don't know the exact purpose of REM sleep or even why we dream. So what is so special about the human brain compared to the brain of other animals? We have one of the largest ratios of brain weight to body weight of any species on this planet, but it's been a very, very long time in the making. Long ago, when brains first started out, they were pretty basic. There was just a group of specialized cells with the ability to transmit electrical signals to move other cells. And in an eat or be eaten world, mobility was a really good idea. And then what happened was the ability to actually sense the environment, so you were able to sense predators. And then after that, another group of cells developed into specialized structures that give you your emotions, and other cells relayed messages to the spinal column because your limbs were now further away. So a brain was pretty amazing when you consider all these factors together. A stimulus from the environment would cause an emotion that would lead to a physical action, fight, flight, or pursuit. So after a long while, a change started happening that led us towards your modern day brain. The brain began to sprout an area called the neocortex. Please forgive me for using this, but I couldn't make it any simpler. So it is the neocortex. And eventually, as time went by, the neocortex actually tripled in size to give us a brain more complex than any other animal. The neocortex actually engulfed the entire part of the brain stem so that's why you kind of got this bumpy thing that seems to look on the end. It's because the neocortex came out and that's what gives us our huge brains. And the coolest thing that we got from the neocortex was consciousness. And consciousness is what enables us to learn from our experiences. It helps us plan ahead and solve problems and make decisions. We are the only living creatures that use language like words or symbols that represent objects, actions, qualities, feelings or ideas. Other animals do communicate, but they do not communicate in as complex ways as we do. So of course the next question is if the neocortex gives us consciousness, what the heck is consciousness? We think we know who we are because we have the ability to be conscious of our own consciousness. But what the heck does that mean scientifically? Trying to understand the intimate mysteries of conscious experience has become increasingly popular these days. Every field of academia has seemed to be taking a renewed interest in what David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. Why should a physical system give rise to conscious experience at all? Once upon a time, the study of consciousness was just left to philosophers and religion because science had no reliable techniques that they could use to solve this hard problem. But now in recent years, we've developed startling new ways to study the brain and sciences back in the game with the hopes of finding a more convincing explanation of what exactly it is to be a conscious entity. At this point, scientists are arguing passionately who's over in the right playing field and the rifts between them run really deep. Some people even argue that the problem is too difficult, that no good explanation can ever be given. No one knows if consciousness will ever be explained in present day science. What is the difference between the mind and the brain? The American Heritage-Deadman Medical Dictionary defines the brain as the portion of the central nervous system that is enclosed within the cranium, continuous with the spinal cord, composed of gray and white matter. It is the primary center of the regulation and control of bodily activities, receiving and interpreting sensory impulses, transmitting information to the muscles and body and organs. It is also the seat of consciousness, thought, memory, and emotion. The same dictionary defines the mind as the human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination. So if you remember, I just told you that the biological basis of consciousness is still unanswered by modern day science. You will probably now find yourself completely and totally confused, which means you're on the right track. I'd like to welcome you to the mind-brain problem. Is the mind part of the brain? Is the brain part of the mind? If they're distinct, how do they interact with each other? And who exactly is in charge? Many modern day scientists have proposed that the mind is a product of brain activity, but whether it is or not, we don't actually know. Despite that there are a number of theories and of course the obvious interest in solving this problem, it has been hampered by a lack of experimental models to test such theories. So neuroscience is actually still holding out in hope of a solution. The next one's everybody's favorite question to ask me. Why do drugs and alcohol feel so good and why does addiction happen? The answer to this question starts so, so simply. All animals have a reward pathway in their brain. The reward pathway exists to help secure the survival of the species by making us feel good as positive reinforcements so the behavior is repeated. Pretty simple to start out with. It's what gives us our love for food and sex and companionship. Scientists think that all addictive drugs activate the brain's reward system. At first these act in the same way as natural rewards producing pleasure, but with increased use the drugs needed to stop, I totally have to, there we go. The drugs that are used to stop unpleasant symptoms that appear when it's not available. So it sees the facts that contribute to drug addiction. Addiction is actually different than physical dependence. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines addiction, I love the dictionary, as compulsive psychological need for the use of habit forming substance characterized by a tolerance of well-defined psychological symptoms upon withdrawal. The same dictionary also uses the broad entry that you've probably heard of that defines addiction as persistent compulsive use of the substance known by the user to be physically, psychologically, and sociologically harmful. Physical dependence on a drug is neither necessary nor sufficient to define addiction. Where it gets tricky is that addiction and physical dependence often occur together. However, addiction can be present without physical dependence and vice versa. To make things even more complicated, not all drugs of abuse create dependency and people can experience withdrawal symptoms from drugs that don't addict them or make them physically or psychologically dependent. Some drugs of abuse produce tolerance and some don't and not everyone that uses a drug of abuse will become addicted. So I'm sure you wonder, how does this all relate to video games? Repetition and learning is how we learn. I'm sure you guys had to write things out over and over again when you were in school to learn how to spell. And video games shine when it makes it fun to repeat a task. Practice may not make perfect, but it's quite possible that it will make permanent. If you repeat a task often enough, it will connect in your brain and it will become easier. Things that you expect that you'll never do, you can do if you just keep repeating it. But repeating things have a tendency to be really boring and video games don't. So combining them both is the best way in order to come up with a learning device that we're not going to like want to run away from. My computer, there we go. And now I'm gonna move on to some video game myths because a lot of people do ask me stuff about video games and scientific research on video games. So we're gonna now move away from the human brain and we're gonna look back on a little bit of history. Rock and roll, comic books, films, and even novels have been blamed for corrupting the young and have been the subject of frequent controversy and censorship. With the majority of North America residents having at least one video game system in their home these days, the video game industry is now the latest phenomenon accused of sending society to hell in a handbasket. So I'm gonna move on to cleaning up some of the misconceptions behind five of the most common myths about video games. Myth number one, video games are mainly marketed towards children. And just like books, movies, and TV shows, video games are now out created for a diverse audience of all ages. And the fact is that some are simply not intended for children. It's true that most American kids do play video games, but there's been a shift in the video game market as first generation of video game players have continued into adulthood and they have now put aside their favorite pastime. Gaming technologies and graphics have become more realistic during the last years and they make video games completely and continually appealing to the youth that grew up on them. Game designers and corporations are now redirecting their marketing strategy to an older and more mature audience with plush paychecks who are nostalgically looking to video games for relief from stress and boredom from day-to-day life. To date, 62% of the console market and 66% of the PC market is aged 18 or older. Myth number two, children have become more violent since the introduction of video games. According to the US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics report in 2005. Well, there is no real differences between 2004 and 2005 in the percentages of household experiencing any crime, both violent and property crime declined between 1994 and 2005. US households experiencing one or more crimes dropped from 25% in 1994 to 14% in 2005. The percentages declined each year between 1994 and 2001 for leveling off in 2002 through 2005. There are no year-to-year changes after 2001. I'm sure you're wondering what does this mean in plain English? Well, during that 40-year low in violent crime, Wolfenstein was introduced in 1992. Quake was introduced in 1996, and even the bad boy himself, Grand Theft Auto, made its debut during that time in 1998. The children who would have been playing video games during that period of time are now of legal drinking age, and by statistic standards, have grown into productive members of society. Myth number three, violent video games make children more aggressive. I'm sure you guys have all heard this in the media news. Violent video games, aggressive, ah, there's gonna be a violent crime wave. So there actually is very little evidence from our current body of literature that violent video games that casually or correlationally are associated with increased aggressive behavior. It is true that violent video games appear to increase aggressive thoughts, but that does not mean violent video games will increase aggressive behavior. Wouldn't these same studies logically show that an increase in aggression when playing football in the school playground as well? There are several major gaps when it comes to the research in violent video game literature. One especially large gap is that all research takes place in a temporary period, and there are no long-term studies. I would like to say that again. There's no long-term studies on the ability of violent video games to make people aggressive. Also, other gaps include the sample size tends to be too small and too many of the studies. Some studies, when analyzing aggressive behavior, they've used dependent variables that are not true aggressive behavior, and some studies do not have violent and nonviolent games and are sufficiently different in actual violent content. You have to understand defining violent content is very, very hard. Do we include cartoon violence, or is that not realistic? Do we include non-cartoon violence? And even as it's hard for us to define what we consider violent, scientists don't use the same variables across the board. So if you read that there's this study, you don't know what they're considering violence or what they're considering aggressive. So you really, when you see these things, always, and the news is going crazy about them, always look at the studies because you will just shake your head and be like, well, I could totally, with bubblegum and a paperclip, have done a better study than what they've done here. This is my personal favorite. Girls just don't like video games. Historically, people working inside the video game industry and the video game market itself, they've been predominantly male. Also, many earlier adverts for video games depicted gamers as male. I can personally remember being with my brother as a young child, and they would always depict these boys playing the game and the girls were like, yay, watching. So I totally can remember that. So in the mid-1990s, real efforts were actually made to build games that appeal to girls. I'm sure you guys know of the runaway hit The Sims. The majority of people who played The Sims are actually female. This was the first game that really started bringing women in to play video games. The percentage of women playing games was steadily increased over the past decade. Women gamers are not bound to console gaming. The majority of casual gamers, 60% are women, and women age 40 and older, when they go online, spend a longer time playing games than men or teenagers do. There's now a generation of players who are comfortable with computers, and computer are literally enough to be with online socializing, and they all remember the traditional games of their childhood. So we now have people who are crossing over and getting older and are using video games in a way we've never had before. This one I love as well because I have so many friends that play World of Warcraft. So, so many friends that play World of Warcraft. Playing video games is socially isolating. Not only do video games have socially redeeming qualities, but they can actually help promote social interaction. 60% of frequent game players play with friends, 33% play with siblings, and 25% play with spells and parents. And these are older statistics. I'm sure with now with the Wii coming out, we're gonna see those statistics. Like I've never seen a system before bring so many people together, and families playing video games like never before. So I'm sure that those statistics will end up going up. When it comes to online gaming, the internet has created numerous gaming possibilities that were not possible with single-player games by giving the opportunity to choose to work as a team or to compete against human impotence. It's a place for social interaction and relationships that expands beyond the workplace and the home. And it has the ability to expose gamers to ideas, worldview, and cultures that they may not otherwise get a chance to experience. There is no research to date that actually shows that online video games are more addictive than single-player video games. That doesn't exist. It just seems a lot of people like World of Warcraft, so it has a tendency to cross over. And now we get to move on to the fantastic Joe Grant, and I am so looking forward to him doing the history of peripherals. The interesting question you need to ask yourself is those of you who are old like me will remember a lot of new ideas that have come out that have already previously existed. For 13 years, there was no new peripherals. Everything seems to be recycled, and you have to really wonder what happened. So Joe is gonna bring us to the most interesting history of peripherals, and these are not his slides, so please, please have sympathy as he kind of looks as you do to figure out what he's talking about. So everyone, Joe Grant. Cool, wow. That stuff was really cool. I like that you actually described it in a way that I could understand it, because normally I don't read books. All right. So I guess the history of peripherals, and this is tying together all of the brain stuff that Desiree talked about with trying to create some sort of game that's controlled by the human brain. So we're gonna go over some of the original peripherals that came out for some of the video game systems and kind of see where they started, see where they've been for a while, and then see where the industry's going, and why this type of thing that she's been working on is really pretty cool. In the early, in the 1980s, when the Atari came out, Colecovision and television. I like all the old stuff, so I was actually thrilled to be able to do these slides. Basically, anything that came out was pretty innovative we had. Well, I'll show you in a few slides, but there's different types of joysticks, different types of controllers and interfaces, and because there wasn't really a video game industry before that, anything that came out was pretty cool. So we had all sorts of different games, all sorts of different gameplay. But then what happened is in the mid-90s, and I'll show you the systems, but it was like PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64, all the controllers ended up being the same. There wasn't any new innovation, and it almost seemed like the audience, like the players, never really adopted anything new, or maybe it was just that the publishers didn't want to spend the money to develop new stuff. And then we see with the Wii and the popularity of DDR, there's some areas now that are pretty popular again, like Samba de Amigo is something really cool. I think it was on the PS2, but I mean, where else would you be able to dance around with the Maracas and stuff, and that was fun. But so there's a lot of new stuff that ended up coming out, and that turns out that now there's the resurgence in some of the older stuff, so you see a lot of things that were once available in the early, or late 80s, and early 80s I guess, now coming out again for these newer systems, and it's a whole new generation of people. So everybody, well maybe some of you guys remember the Atari? Cool. All right, so I'm not the only old one here. Oh, someone else remembers the Atari. Oh, the power button never works. All right, it's my wife. She always calls at the perfect time. She's being mobbed in the vendor area and has no idea what to do. So, that's all right. If she calls back, we'll answer it on speakerphone. All right, so 1972, Pong came out, and that was actually prior to the Atari. So this was a single-game system, Pong. You had your two paddles. You could actually, this version was the, I think the arcade version, and then a few years later was the home video game version. So you had two players, and all there were were two things. And a ball, and two players would play against each other, and you'd try to score more points. And there wasn't even any artificial intelligence at that point. You had to play against a friend. So there's part of social interaction right there. And actually, an interesting story about when Atari first released Pong, they beta-tested it at a place called Andy Caps, I think, somewhere in Sunnyvale. And it was in a bar, and they put this thing in there. And a few hours later, one of the engineers at Atari got a phone call. They're like, the machine's broken. You've got to come down and fix it. So he rushed down to try to fix the thing and open the coin box, and the entire coin box had overflowed. And it was like, oh, shit. So they empty the coin box and put it back in a few hours later, it overflowed again. Because people started realizing, wow, it's an awesome video game. It was the first arcade game that was actually a huge, huge success to the masses. So that was 1972, and they had the paddle controllers at that point, which was just a potentiometer. And for those of you that are intimately familiar with the Atari, you'll see that is not a paddle controller. That's a driving controller. And that was actually a rotary encoder instead. So there was a lot of really cool stuff going on in the late 70s and early 80s. So 77 is when Atari came out with the VCS, which is also known as the 2600, my favorite system. Even though I guess I was two. But it's one of those systems that everybody seems to recognize. And even if you're a teenager now, you probably have still seen pictures of this thing or played games on some of the newer systems that are based on the old system. So that really set the stage for home consoles. It also brought the first arcade joystick to the home environment. So we see the joystick with the one red button, which everyone identifies as old school. And that was basically just four digital switches left right up down and then another button. No analog stuff yet in there. Here's something that was a foot pedal that I don't think was very successful when it came out. And basically it would let you control stuff with your feet. And I think you had to actually plug a joystick in too. So you could do certain things with the joystick and certain things with your feet. And I think it was intended for flight games and really rudimentary flight simulator, stuff like that. I'd never seen one of these things until about 2002. And there's a whole homebrew community based around writing games for these old systems that I'm heavily involved in. And somebody had actually written a game called Thrust Plus, which is a takeoff of the old Commodore 64 game Thrust. And he ended up finding a huge stash of these foot controllers in some warehouse in Germany or something and designed his game to work with the foot controller. So it's actually the only game that I know of that's really designed to use that. And you can fly around and use the foot pedals to control your gas and brake and whatever. So that was something that was sort of interesting is people were trying a lot of new things back then. And some of them weren't successful and some of them weren't. 1982, the Vectrex came out, which is a really awesome system if you ever get ahold of one. It was a vector-based system. So as opposed to now, we have raster systems and we're drawing across the screen and whatever. This is totally vector-based. So you look and you'll see just discrete lines. It's almost like this thing's drawing in logo. And the images are really sharp. It's a really interesting type of system, totally standalone. These controllers were neat because they actually had little springs inside, so they'd always return to center, which was fun until they broke. And this was also, yeah, they had some other cool stuff. They had something called a light pen, so you could draw on the screen and do stuff with the light pen, which there's some actually pretty cool homebrew hacks out there about how to make your own. They also had the first 3D game, which was basically these goggles that are now really hard to find. Each game came with its own wheel. And inside the goggles, this wheel would spin and somehow synchronized to what was drawn on the screen, so you actually see these vector graphics in 3D. Really, really cool. And that system actually surprisingly didn't do that well compared to the Atari and Collegial Vision, but it's pretty innovative. 83. Everyone knows the toaster. These guys, I actually didn't even know it was 83. I think it was 83 in Japan and maybe 86 in the US or something, but in, I guess, 83 when Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan that became known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US, they had this D-pad controller that sort of became synonymous with games from this point on. The D-pad left, right, up, down, you could do diagonals. That was all digital, hence the D for digital. A, B, start, select. Everybody's seen that. And let's see, Joy-Pads use 8-bit CMOS shift register to tell console what film is being pressed without requiring a deck to wire. Yeah, okay. This is actually pretty cool, too, because before this, with the Atari joysticks, if you looked at the pinout, you'd have a connection for each thing. You'd have up, down, left, right button, and then you'd have ground. So when you hit one of the directions, you'd ground that connection just like a physical switch. But this was the first thing that actually had some intelligence inside the controller, so you'd have a serial interface, basically transmitting some stream of data with a less number of wires to the Nintendo, so the system could say, okay, I'm hitting A, B, A, B, left, right, up, down, and let me in. So that was sort of interesting, because now you don't need an individual wire for every single button you have on your controller. If you did, like with the PS2 or whatever, you'd have a huge, gigantic connector. So now the controllers are somewhat intelligent. 84 to 89, Nintendo just was huge. They took over the video game industry that had crashed, at least in the US, in like 83, 84, and just demolished. Nintendo's Apper was one of the first light guns. There was a light gun that came out, that was designed by my friend Ralph Beyer, who's very old now, that also designed the Odyssey, the original Odyssey system, who also arguably designed Pong, and his light gun was actually like a real rifle with a little light sensor on the end, and he was a sniper or like a rifleman in the army a long time ago. But now it's an actual product at this point, the Zapper. They were originally gray, but then they had to turn orange due to some legal issues, I guess, because kids were running around with them, and cops thought they were real. It doesn't look anything like a real gun. Oh, okay, 10 minutes, I better hurry up. Nintendo satellite. Nintendo had this thing, you could plug in and then wirelessly control a bunch of controllers, so you could sit on your bed and play, and don't have to sit right in front of the TV. The Rob, the ROB, was cool, that actually interfaced with the Nintendo, and was also controlled by signal sent from the TV, so it had an infrared sensor, and there was some sort of photo detector. So really, some pretty crazy stuff. The NES advantage was a huge controller. Powerpad, first kind of dance mat. The games pretty much sucked, except for world-class track meet, which was fun. They had even like a dance aerobics game, but that was pretty successful. And then the power glove was just really cyber, everyone knows that one. So really crazy stuff, and I mean, some of these vendors had to have some pretty huge balls to try to release stuff like that, and some of it was successful, some of it wasn't. Sega, the same type of stuff, they were competing, the Genesis was competing with Nintendo with the NES. They had some pretty uber stuff too, like that huge arm-mounted gun thing on the right. Their new controller had even more buttons, which you could somehow use if you could figure out what all of them meant. Super Nintendo, there's the original D-pad, but they've added a few more buttons, and now they have the shoulder buttons, so they've done some research and realized people like to use their fingers like triggers. And I guess this was the first one that had the diamond configuration of the buttons on the right, those four buttons. Sega Saturn, didn't do too well at all, but this gigantic controller is, I don't even know how much this thing weighed, but it's huge. It's like, I think they skipped the ergonomic user interface test. But anyway, it's gigantic, and I guess this was the first thing that used an analog stick. So in the upper left, you can see it's two potentiometers that determine X and Y movement. So that was actually pretty innovative, even though the system itself didn't really do too well. 94 PS2, our original PlayStation, now you have two analog controllers, a bunch of digital buttons, and then a bunch of the shoulder buttons as well. And you'll see this ends up being the standard for a little while. Here's the cool Nintendo 64 one. They had a microphone in their games. Okay, now we're up to 2006, the PS3, the same looking thing that's been done since 1996. Oh my God, is this there? All right, I'm sorry, I have to do this. Hi, you're on speakerphone, and I'm giving a talk. I'm giving a talk, everyone say hi. All right, tell everyone to go see some talks and come back later, and buy some shirts. Oops. That was Romer, the guy that set up the vendor area. Tell him I'm sorry. Yeah, all right, bye. Oh, I'm in trouble now. So basically it's the same type of layout since 1994, 1996, nothing changed for 10 years, and that's sort of boring. Then finally, the Wii comes out. I should say the PS3 does have accelerometers in there. The Wii comes out, this thing, nobody thought it would be successful at all. It's a totally unique side of controller, the nunchuck thing, and accelerometers inside, some infrared detectors, and a huge amount of games being developed for the system, and all of a sudden people are like, wow, this thing's cool. We don't have to just sit on our couch and just move the joystick around. So it's like this whole new generation of marketeers come up and they're like, let's take advantage of these kids and make them exercise. So I think this is your slide. So I'm gonna have to tell you this really quickly because we're almost out of time. In 2007, there will be an amazing new thing being introduced. They will be combining, and I've been waiting for this for five years, but they will be combining video games with actual EEG headsets. As you can see, she has on. There will be, we will have mine to video games. We will never, now if they can just bring toilets to the couch, will be perfect. But so this will change video games forever. You guys next year, nothing will be the same ever again. So be aware that this is coming. I wanna mention one thing with that is Atari actually tried to do a mine control system back in 1983 or something. Right, that I was supposed to do. And basically it didn't work very well and you sort of just had to wiggle your face to make it move. And they were trying to say it was this type of stuff, but it wasn't, and it didn't work. So maybe they'll do it right this time. Right, and Nintendo also came out in Japan with something called Bio Tetris, which is what I was going to show you. I actually thought it was an original idea, but Nintendo had to run me again. So there actually is a thing called Tetris 64. So, and it had a little earpiece. So back in the 80s, they were already doing this. So you really have to wonder what took them so long to like get this all done. So basically I'm gonna have to skip really, really quick. Everything is gonna get really, really kick ass. That's basically what that is. And we'll have to skip all this, because we're almost out. So basically with the right video games, you can do amazing things. We will be able to treat ADD, we'll be able to help people with anxiety disorders. There's already people who have video games instead of biofeedback, it's called neurofeedback, so you totally are able to connect this all together. It will basically help us build ourselves into doing things we never thought before in becoming better humans and having a great time while we're doing it. So I'm gonna just skip through everything. But basically what you're missing, what I was gonna be doing is basically how the game worked is it's hooked up to your heart rate. And I created it because I'm a really anxious, high-strung person. So how it works is when you would play it, if we could be playing it, is that as you get more stressed out and you play Tetris, the more stressed out you get, the faster the pieces would fall. And the less stressed out you get, the slower the pieces would fall. So it was actually pretty awesome. And hopefully you guys will come back next year and I will hopefully have it if America lets me. And, but there's gonna be all sorts of crazy things happening, like your brain, emotions we actually did next year. You could emotionally control the game as well. If you got more stressed out and more angry, you would also be able to make the pieces go faster and slower. So the whole point would be in order to train yourself. A lot of people are surprised to find out that relaxation is actually something, this is why most people in North America have trouble with meditation. It's actually something that is learned. And if you are unable to recognize it, it can take a long time. Like meditation, it takes people a long time to be able to communicate with their bodies. That's why biofeedback exists in the first place. So you're able to have feedback to go, am I doing this right? Am I doing this right now? So they've actually done a lot of things with biofeedback and meditation. I actually in my quest to find out about how to deal with my anxiety actually stayed with Buddhist monks and they were great. And they totally helped me with that as well to understand the connection between the mind and the brain as you guys learned as well and how to work biofeedback as well. There's more slides that you won't have a chance to read. So basically we did do a biofeedback game. So we didn't get sued, it's actually called Brain Blocks. Brain Blocks, not Tetris, please don't confuse the two. And there is a galvanic one as well. So just like what the Scientologists use, but less creepy. And much more fun. So as you approach an intense emotional state, things would get better. So please, I don't know if you guys can see that, that code. There is, that frozennorth.net is where Julian works. He actually works in the video game industry and does educational software. So I don't know if you guys can read that. It's www.frozenorth.net. Defcon 15, Bio Blocks with an X, B-I-O-B-L-O-X.zip. Eventually I'll also have all the links that I use to write my speech because people always ask me for that and they're a lot. Just be aware they're like five or six pages of links. So they will eventually be up there. My co-speaker actually was unable to come because of a family emergency. So I'm not sure when it'll be up, but it will, I promise, someday. So hopefully you guys will be able to see that too. And we are so, one minute, we are so out of time. So I am Neon Rain and this is the amazing Joe Gran who just saved my butt. So give it up for Joe Gran.