So, you're telling me... (Photo: Screengrab)

Gentlemen, have you been feeling a bit bored at the urinal lately? You know--you're a couple drinks in so it's time to tap a kidney, but you're not quite drunk enough that standing is a struggle. Perhaps you could use a little light entertainment, something that'll make you whistle while you wiz?

Well, good news. Wired reports that a company is working on a gaming system that works not via joystick or touchscreen, but rather by stream. You score by aiming your pee according to the demands of the game.

Naturally, this is a play for ad revenue. Captive Media--as in captive audience--plans to sell spots to advertisers before (as visitors unzip) and after (as visitors zip) the game. The systems will go into public restrooms; think beer advertisements in the pub bathroom. Thus far, they've raised $700,000 in seed capital.

Nor will you get stuck playing the same game over and over. Says Wired:

There are five games that pop up at random on the UES, including On the Piste, where you speed down a ski run trying to hit penguins; Clever Dick, a trivia game which uses the direction of your stream to pick an answer, and Artsplash, a coloring game which I can only imagine is akin to drawing in the snow.

For those curious, here's an introductory video scored to a rousing techno beat. Please note the slightly sloshed Brit who says, "Yeah, that's like a man's dream," as though he were being given the map to El Dorado.

No word on when someone will introduce a competitive offering for the ladies.

The pair went on to gain experience helping big brands on the digital side, she with Ann Taylor and he with Gucci and Nike. As they see it, the future of branded experiences is gameficiation, which represents the next generation of attracting and engaging users.

Their latest venture, PlayAPI, is a suite of tools and templates that allows brands to create custom game experiences. It gives them a framework for tapping into different social graphs and rewarding their customers.

Ben and Jordan liked the this team's experience, but did they bite on the company's product?

Click through here to learn more about Lerer Ventures.

Want to know more about all the companies involved? Check out our founder's guide here.

And if you need to catch up, here's the premier episode of The Pitch.

But although the developer teams selected to participate skewed toward the larger side--the New York Daily News reports teams representing companies from Google to Victoria's Secret-- it sounds like the winners were inspired by the start-up world. Among the five awardees chosen by judges like Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne and Meetup co-founder Scott Heiferman were an team of expats who developed a Q&A site in the same vein as Stack Overflow and Quora. They suggested seeking out "super-experts" to answer everything from where to eat on the LES to how tricks for getting your kid into kindergarten.

The "Judge's Prize" was awarded to another idea that borrowed a page from the start-up world. Casson Rosenblatt, Matthew Howell, and Tom Gibbons came up with the idea of MyNYC.gov, which brings gamification to being a good citizen, awarding points to residents who report potholes and downed trees.  Their suggestion was that citizens could then use those points to compel the city to make small grants toward a local cause.

Ms. Sterne stressed that a winning vote didn't necessarily mean a commitment to implement the idea, telling the Daily News, "What we hope is that it will inspire us and help us to inform our decision-making process internally," as the city's website redesign is finalized over the next couple months. Perhaps local government can learn a lesson from the start-up world as well and iterate as it goes.

Investors are becoming addicted to non-game startups that leverage game mechanics, VentureBeat writes:

The notion of engaging consumers using game thinking and game mechanics has transformed both startup pitches and later-stage company strategies. Investors have taken notice and are ramping up their funding in what they perceive as a major, multi-billion-dollar market opportunity.

"Gamification," or adding points, badges and other illusory incentives to reward behavior, is becoming a de riguer tool for startups. Foursquare has New Yorkers scrambling to claim "mayorships," which mean even less today than when the concept was introduced—though they still apparently provide enough incentive to get users to disclose their locations to advertisers.

This morning, The Observer wrote about Fitango, a new website built around meeting goals, which awards badges for completion. The social butterfly of New York's startup scene, Hashable, awards points for networking and invites users to parties based on their ranking on the site's leaderboards.

The gaming component of the app is so sticky that this morning Hashable felt necessary to tweet: "Hashable is not about the Game, it's about your life. It's supposed to be a fun way to keep track of things. The game is a kicker!"

Oh, but life IS a game, Hashable!

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries