I've long been intrigued by Michael Lew's voodoo doll interface for his interactive video sit-com, Office Voodoo (alumni.media.mit.edu/~lew/research/voodoo/), produced in 2002 at the MIT media lab Europe.
Office Voodoo is an office sit-com for two characters, Frank and Nancy. Each of the characters has a voodoo doll interface with which two users can play. Pressure sensors and accelerometers placed inside the dolls measure activity, while vibrating motors and flashing LEDs provide visual and haptic feedback. Users can thus rock the doll gently to make it happy or shake it violently to make it angry. The action in the video is edited live to react to those mood swings of both characters and, depending on the location in the matrix of contrasting or complementary emotions, Frank and Nancy either fight over office equipment, have sex on top of it or anything in between. The dolls function both as emotional transference objects and as a tangible interface to a dynamic dramatic situation.
I haven't had the opportunity to interact with these dolls and characters, but this hybrid of tangible interfaces, which are themselves toys, and combinatorical storytelling fascinates me, especially in relation to my own research and work on interfaces for storytelling, for example the touch-screen interactive portrait interface of the Interface Portrait storyteller system (www.knoller.com/ip/).