A Twitch streamer hooked up their brain to an EEG imaging device in order to play Elden Ring by controlling the character with their mind. By attaching sensor pads to their head that pick up on the electrical signals of the brain, they were able to map the activity to correspond to controls in Elden Ring.The Guinness Book of World Records has a category for beating Dark Souls with different controller types, and now it will have to add this to the list for Elden Ring, if it even counts it as a different kind of controller. The streamer who set up the EEG to play Elden Ring has a Master's in Psychology and specializes in vision. While she's managed to connect pads to her head that read the brain's signals, she has to keep them wet with saline in order to keep them effective. She hasn't mapped out all of the controls, though she trained it to recognize brain patterns and then bound them to the attack key.Jake Lucky shared on Twitter about the player literally using her mind to beat Elden Ring, Twitch streamer Perrikaryal. A British-Canadian streamer in her twenties, she has a Bluetooth brain scanner that she can use with coding and bind to games. Sometimes on her stream, Perrikaryal will even show the scan in real-time while she plays different games such as horror so that fans can see her brain as she gets scared. In Elden Ring, she still moves with the thumbstick and presses different buttons, but whenever she attacks the command is coming directly from her brain.
Perrikaryal stated on stream that the tech isn't perfect and sometimes the attack will fire off even when she's not thinking about it, or won't when she needs it to. However, it's sensitive enough to reliably defeat bosses. She's made it past Godrick the Grafted and Margit but is currently struggling with Renala because her first phase relies on well-timed and frequent attacks, which she admits the EEG does not excel at. She says that the best visualization that works to activate the attack is to imagine slowly pushing something heavy forward.
It remains to be seen if EEG streams will ever become common like Twitch streams with eye trackers. The next generation of reaction content might let fans see how a person's brain responds to different videos and games.
Elden Ring is available to play on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X/S.