The Guts Game is a digital game that uses ingestible sensors to highlight emerging opportunities to design novel bodily experiences.

The Guts Game is a two-player mobile game that uses ingestible sensors to capture players’ gut temperature as core game mechanic. It involves changing one’s gut temperature to outscore an opponent and to win a race.

Unlike most games that are controlled via external controllers, the Guts Game uses an ingestible sensor in the form of a pill, with which the players control the game by varying their gut temperature. This can occur either through food intake of different temperatures, exercising or changing environmental conditions. With the Guts Game, we show that the usage of gut temperature as a game input is feasible and demonstrate that experiencing your body as play, via an ingestible sensor, can be a mesmerizing play experience.

Talk at CHI PLAY ’18

Publications

Mueller, F., Wang, Y., Li, Z., Kari, T., Arnold, P., Mehta, Y., Marquez, J., Khot, R. Towards Experiencing Eating as Play. TEI 2020. Long paper. ACM.  Talk video.

Li, Z., Patibanda, R., Brandmueller, F., Wang, Y., Berean, K., Greuter, S., Mueller, F. The Guts Game: Towards Designing Ingestible Games. CHI PLAY 2018. Long paper. ACM. 271-283. VideoTalk video.

Li, Z., Brandmueller, F., Greuter, S. and Mueller, F. 2018. The Guts Game: Designing Playful Experiences for Ingestible Devices. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI 2018 Videoshowcase. Finalist. ACM, 1-1. Video.

Brandmueller, F., Li, Z. Guts Game – A Game using Ingestible Sensors. CHI PLAY 2017. Student Game Competition Finalist. ACM. 625-631.

Li, Z., Brandmueller, F., Mueller, F., Greuter, S. Ingestible Games – Swallowing a Digital Sensor to Play a Game CHI PLAY 2017. Work in Progress. ACM. 511-518.

Acknowledgements

We thank Kyle Berean and Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh from RMIT’s School of Engineering for giving us plenty of advice and we also thank Patrick Baudisch for support. We also thank everyone who helped with the video and the development and design.

Press coverage

A computer game’s edible controller lets you play it with your gut. New Scientist.

Forget joysticks — the Guts Game is controlled by a sensor that you swallow. Digital Trends.

An edible controller moves gaming from the screen to your gut. Futurism.

The Bizarre New Game You Play By Swallowing A Sensor. Forbes.

This New Game Has an Edible Controller. Bloomberg.