changed: - Some thoughts on Mindbending Software Inc. When it's in the game it's in the brain ! Mindbending Software Inc. is a project by c0deNerr0r. The project is a cynical view on the game and media industry and onto our society in general. Computer games are the "soma" of our time, people get lost in their gaming phantasies where they play agents or super heroes killing aliens. These games gain more and more influence in shaping a new generation. The question we as artists rise is what happens if big game companies add subconscious content to their games (maybe they have already), the impact would be enormous because youngster sit more in front of their computer games, then they watch TV. From advertisment we know that there are several techniques in video montage and cuts to brand a product into our brains, we live already in a media condtioned society. And the direction is clear games are commerce you already are able to order a pizza online in the massive multiplayer game. In this project we pretend to be a company selling various software packages, which once installed on a computer, condition the player accordingly to the product (Tranquilizer makes him calm, etc.). This is done by mingling conscious and subconscious messages in the game content. Mindbending claims to be the care company and wants to help parents to shape their kids to their expectations, the parents use the parental control center, a software to control the conditioning process various parameters can be change here and the success rate of the conditioning process is displayed in realtime.. There are various layers in the project, the manipulation through media (especially for young people), the wish for a better life, the belief in a pill for everything, the unbreakable belief in technique as a solution for everything and all in all the first world paradigm. Parents are afraid of their children getting more and more stupid if they sit in front of their games, for them it would be the easiest to buy something like our product, the wish kid, genetic engineering will make it possible to generate the perfect kid, but until then mind control from TV and computer games have to do the job. This project is a satire but it's real, the software really works, it's no fake, the software does exactly what is described in the advertisment (inclusive electro shock therapy), it could really be a commercial product, but we are artists and others get rich, is it not always like that? And apart from that we don't want to manipulate innocent children ;-) The scary thing was even though our website is done in the style of a hoax site, people believe it and ask if there is a demo version, because the prices are quite steep (1000 US Dollar), for a trial. In blogs and newsgroup they discuss the benefits and drawbacks of such a system and if it's a real company or a fake. One blogger wrote that it is a total hoax, on the next day I used my old hacking skills, faked up a email from a laywer in Austria and told him off blogging the untruth about our company otherwise we would sue him, on the next day I checked his blog and the entry about our company was gone. Media works that way, manipulate the manipulators. As I stated the software has really been developped by us and we can manipulate various games (at least all games which use OpenGL as a render and linux as OS), accordingly to our needs. With a very clever software trick, we are getting all information of games and can manipulate this data, we can distort the audio/visual content, we can add things, or if we like we can delete something out of the game. We have a webcamera input for Tranquilizer and Mobilizer, and a relais circuit for controling the electroshock device Electrolizer. >From a technical point of view this manipulation of games is done via a trick which makes the operating system belief that our software is the rendering software, so all drawing commands are passed to our software, we draw the things we should, but not necessarly in the way we should, the same we do for the audio output. The distortion then can be controlled by another programm which measures the quantity of motion of a player which is filmed by the webcam. This project could be defined as game art, hacktivism, neuropsychological experiment, deconstruction of mass consumer products, or simply as an another attempt to make people think and change the world to the better. We never will give up to be idealists. Regards, c0deNerr0r