This is a mini game about the Reward System of the brain, inspired by my time living in Bangkok, where I was surrounded by the omnipresent Buddhist symbols in a city rich in sensory stimulation and aspiration.
In the 1954 experiment by James Olds and Peter Milner that led to the discovery of Dopamine, the pleasure molecule, mice with electrodes implanted in different parts of their brains were found to press an electrically connected lever to receive tiny jolts of current. Some even pressed the lever up to 2,000 times per hour. These were the ones with implants in the septum and nucleus accumbens areas, which are associated with the experience of pleasure through basic functions such as eating and sex.
The player controls a mouse. To win the game, their task is to figure out how many times they need to press the lever of pleasure to progress toward becoming a human.
A re-enactment of the discovery of self-stimulation in 1954 (source: McGill University)
