Hold on to your joysticks, men. There's finally a videogame where you don't have to stop playing to go to the bathroom. In fact, with this game you do play -- with yourself -- in the bathroom.

"You're in Control" is all about the bathroom.

It's a game developed around the art of keeping urination where it belongs: in the urinal. Tonight on "Tech Live," see why its creators, two MIT researchers, believe it's more than a tinkle trainer -- it's also for breaking down social barriers.

MIT guys gone wild

"With this system you can mark your digital territory since you can no longer mark your physical territory, because of all of our sanitation codes and social mores," says the game's co-creator, Dan Maynes-Aminzade ("Monzy" for short), a research assistant at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fellow researcher and creator Hayes Solos Raffle describes the game even more succinctly.

"We wanted to bring some of the fun back into peeing," he says.

The idea is to use the force and direction of a urination stream to control icons on a video screen directly above the urinal.

"The game is based on the popular arcade game 'Whack-A-Mole,' where moles pop up and you try to hit them. Instead, now you're peeing on them... and they're hamsters instead of moles," Monzy says with a chuckle.

Both men say that although they're not trying to reinvent the social order surrounding public urination, there are practical uses for the device.

"If you look at any men's restroom... there are usually splashes all over the walls and floor," Maynes-Aminzade says.

"It's a well-documented problem," Solos Raffle adds, "and there's even history of devices to help men aim better."

Wanting to demonstrate the system in public and being careful not to exclude those without the necessary equipment (i.e. women), the two came up with a game device.

Lightsabers not allowed

"We made this strap-on controller that's actually a garden hose nozzle attached to some water reservoirs that I squeeze to pressurize [and] use to squirt water at the urinal as if I was actually peeing," Maynes-Aminzade explains.

The two men designed the device using an array of sensors placed in the back of the urinal. Wires route up through the plumbing, through the flush handle, and into sensor inputs on a microcontroller that processes the signal and sends it to a PC laptop wired to the back of the installation.

Maynes-Aminzade wrote the software for the game in C++. "I programmed a series of interactive games that run in Windows and operate on a fairly low-end laptop," he says.

Money where your mark is

The duo is already thinking about marketing the game to arcades and game centers such as Jillian's and Dave & Buster's.

"This could improve sanitation because people are encouraged to aim, and could drive drink sales," Maynes-Aminzade says. "People will drink more beer so they can go back and break the high score. They can take the gaming right into the bathroom with them and keep on gaming."

The men are also working on a networked multiplayer game. "I think that would produce an interesting social phenomenon whereas now only women go to the bathroom in groups, men might start going to the bathroom in groups as well to get a new high score," Maynes-Aminzade says. "It really would be a pissing contest."