Twitch Streamer Controls Palworld using Only her Mind

29 Jan at 20:37

The playable character of Palworld standing in front of a pure quartz node in the snow.

Nicole Carpenter
is a senior reporter specializing in investigative features about labor issues in the game industry, as well as the business and culture of games.

Twitch streamer Perrikaryal is using her mind to play survival creature-catching game Palworld. Using a totally hands-free setup, Perrikaryal is crafting, fighting, jumping, and catching Pals only using her brain, set up to a electroencephalogram (EEG) device. She uses four commands with mind control, several voice commands to fill in the gaps, and gyro- and eye-tracking for movement.

It’s something Perrikaryal has done before with Fortnite, Elden Ring, Halo Infinite, Fall Guys, and several other games, but Palword uses the most mind controls thus far, she said on stream. Perrikaryal uses special devices and programs to “attach” the mind control visualizations and feelings to in-game commands — for instance, she imagines a cricket jumping to make her character jump or thinks about the heat and muscle contractions associated to anger for crafting. She “trains” these visualizations to tie them to the command several times, then jumps into Palworld to test it out. And it works, because it recognizes brain-wave patterns that she’s tied to certain controls.

It’s really stunning to watch in action, and almost hard to comprehend how the practice even works. But if there’s anyone who can, that’s Perrikayal, who has a masters in psychology and beat Elden Ring’s Malenia — one of the hardest bosses of the notoriously hard game — with her mind control technology. For Elden Ring, she uses a controller to move, but uses the same concepts as with Palworld gameplay to play Elden Ring, i.e., imagining different things, like pushing a boulder, to attack. It took a lot of work — like hundreds of deaths — to beat Malenia. But she did it. Perrikayal’s Palworld goal was much simpler: Just to catch a Pal. But she’s only just begun that journey, and there’s a lot more that she’s likely to accomplish. For a game like Elden Ring, she spent a considerable amount of time training the EEG to recognize the patterns associated with whatever she’s imaging, and that process is just beginning for Palworld.