Streamer Creates 'Shockbox' That Gives Electric Jolt to Players When They Take Damage in Game

Whenever we take a hit, we feel disappointed, more so if the damage happens at a crucial juncture in a game. That's a perfectly justified feeling from which most of us recover almost immediately. But imagine getting an electric jolt, albeit of low intensity, every time you take a hit in a game. A streamer called Sheepwave has created a small box that runs on a 9V battery and generates the shock.

Sheepwave, the content creator of Magic: The Gathering, a tabletop cum digital collectible card game, has made it more painful, and a lot spicier. During a YouTube streaming, Sheepwave showed the Shockbox and warned users to “never, ever replicate what I'm doing if you don't know what you are doing”.

The video showed a rectangular, transparent plastic junction box filled with wires. A 9V battery is attached to the box that has tap levers on top. There's a small device similar to a TENS unit (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) that delivers the electrical shock through electrodes tied to a player's arm.

Watch the clip here:

In Magic, players aim to reduce the opponent's life total to zero by hitting them with a combination of monsters and spells. The Shockbox keeps track of a player's life total and each time a player takes a hit, they press a button on the box. Four players can play at a time. Shockbox gives a jolt to a player after they take a random hit. Getting a tiny jolt for every damage would become predictable quickly, so Sheepwave added another method to keep games interesting and players on their toes.

“It tracks four separate thresholds of damage,” Sheepwave told The Verge. “Once a player has taken more damage than their threshold — which is a random value somewhere between 1 and 10 that the box modifies to build suspense at low life totals — it activates a shock, the duration of which is determined by how many points of damage they put in before it went off.”

Simply put, neither the frequency nor the duration of the shock can be predicted. When you now play the game, get ready to squeal or hear the squeal of your opponents.

About safety information, Sheepwave made clear in the video, the Shockbox is “an entirely isolated circuit and nothing is connected to wall power.”