Machinima is reaching out to the internet's baser audience with its new show, "Player VS Pain," a reality show parody with a splash of slapstick violence thrown in for good measure.
In 2001, a pair of German art students created the PainStation, a console featuring pain feedback. Two players play a game of "Pong" against each other, keeping their left hands on a sensor. Every time a point is scored on a player, the player's left hand is either whipped, shocked, or blasted with heat. Score isn't kept, rather, the first player to remove their hand from the sensor is the loser. So the idea of a pain as a threat to losing a game isn't exactly a new concept (as anyone with an older brother might know or who has seen Steve O's show "Killer Karoke").
But with shows like "Wipeout" and "Jackass" proving to be such hits, it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two and put it online or on television. It's what I always wanted to have happen to all those kids who had no concept of what they were doing in "Nick Arcade," who've now been replaced by every arrogant contestant from any reality TV show out there who finally gets what's coming to 'em.
"Player VS Pain" is the brainchild former "Attack of the Show" co-host Kevin Pereria. Nice to know that some aspect of the company will live on after Esquire purchased it in February. Pereria spoke a bit about the new show with newmediarockstars, summing it up by saying "we’ve got guys on waxing tables playing 'Tetris,' and when someone clears five lines they lose a “Tetris”-shaped strip out of their hairy backs and/or thighs or asses." Cheeky.
The best moment of brutality viewers have to look forward to? "There is a great moment where these two very attractive female gamers were playing 'Rock Band' against each other...we decided to up the ante and we put electric stim pads on their arms and on some of their legs at times so we could shock them. It’s that thing in therapy that will make your arm sort of quake a little bit, and so they were getting shocked so hard that they were dropping the 'Rock Band' controllers, and every time they’d miss a serious note or they dropped their controller, a dominatrix would be behind them hitting them with a paddle or flogging them. And so afterwards they were just covered in — I mean, they looked like Courtney Love from the waist down — it was just welts and bruises and sadness. It was amazing."