The Fixed Point

There was a time when you had to go down to the arcade or pizza shop and pump quarters into machines if you wanted to enjoy a video game experience. Then computers and home gaming consoles brought video game entertainment into our living rooms. Now Sega is cornering the niche bathroom gaming market with a gaming interface named “Toirettsu” in which the user controls the game by peeing on sensors in a urinal.
If you can’t go standing up, perhaps Toirettsu isn’t for you (sorry ladies, but your hands-free method allows you to play Angry Birds on the can anyhow). Toirettsu targets restaurant and retail environments, ostensibly in hopes that by giving users goal-oriented mini-games to focus on, their men’s room floors might stay a bit cleaner as gents have somewhere to aim. And, of course, it gives establishments (and Sega) somewhere to place an ad.
We’re not so sure that urinal gaming is going to keep floors any cleaner – in fact, it’s not difficult to imagine it making floors dirtier (ever thrown your controller during a particularly frustrating round of Halo?). But it will make peeing in public toilets more fun. Layer in a multiplayer, head-to-head (pun intended) function and pretty soon men will be going to the bathroom in pairs too.