Watch this Minecraft player get shocked by a dog collar whenever he takes damage

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If you keep your eye on Reddit's Minecraft forum you may have seen a post recently where a player claimed they set up the game so they'd get a real electric shock whenever they took damage. This turned out to be fake, and the post was eventually removed. Oddly enough, however, a real experiment to accomplish this painful idea has been underway for several months.

YouTuber and Minecrafter Dream talked his friend GeorgeNotFound into wearing a shock collar on his arm while they attempted to beat Minecraft together. The collar was hooked up to the game in a way that ensured whenever George took damage in Minecraft, he would get a real, no-joke, electric shock. You can see the full, painful (and yet extremely funny) video above.

Warning: As you might expect, the videos are full of George screaming at the top of his lungs, so protect your ears. As you also might expect, the screaming didn't just come from George being zapped but from George being absolutely terrified of being zapped, so basically anytime a monster gets close to him he releases an ear-splitting shriek and flees, begging Dream to come to his rescue. This is without a doubt the scariest way to play Minecraft—with the promise of genuine pain accompanying the virtual pain.

How did they make it work? The video below from their new channel, DreamTech, explains the step-by-step process of scientifically torturing George, which involved buying a remote-controlled dog shock collar from Amazon, wiring the remote to an Arduino board, and writing custom code to activate the remote whenever George takes damage.

Interesting stuff, though I would definitely not recommend trying it yourself, especially since even despite several tests with the collar set to harmless vibrations and beeps, it still managed to malfunction during the game and give poor George a shock he didn't deserve. 

Dream does an admirable job of protecting George during their playthrough and rushes to protect him as often as possible, but George does get some real shocks at several different points on their adventure. There's also a moment where Dream deliberately hits George simply because he hadn't been shocked in a while. They don't actually beat Minecraft during their playthrough, as after George takes some fall damage while fleeing from a monster he (quite understandably) decides he's had enough pain. 

It's also worth noting that the collar was on the lowest shock setting but still seems to hurt George quite a bit, so if you actually use a shock collar on your dog you're a real piece of trash.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.