Jesse Schell’s mindblowing talk on the future of games
fury.com
fury.com
This is not the future, it is the present.
A great video with a lot of exciting ideas (even if they're articulated somewhat stormily at times). This is definitely a viable advertising platform--one that makes good use of the attractive qualities of capitalism, by inspiring competition and desire for collection within consumers, trading exposure--and (hopefully) real human currency--for fabricated (yet, if implemented correctly, completely desirable) points.
nickpp's point is off the mark. Human currency carries with it an unfortunate (but absolutely and obviously necessary) burden of seriousness. If you spend it foolishly, there's a chance you'll "Game Over"--and (as my mom always used to tell me) there's no reset button in real life, sorry. Implementing a system where individuals apply a certain (limited) extent of value to a new, less dire, capitalistic system, is a win-win for everyone involved.
Blow all of your points on a retinal-based bar-code scanner that barely works? Oh well, at least you can still make rent.
And as for boring - I guess it depends on the player. Personally I find video games incredibly unfulfilling. Lots of fun while playing but leaving an empty feeling afterward, of time completely wasted. While real life is AWESOME! Everything I do and create improves my life and that of the people around me.
But again - it depends on the person.
Not a critique -- just an FYI for anyone who goes to read the slides rather than watch the video.
On one hand, you have the grim, over-commercialized future where you're being watched and tracked all the time and everything you do is only to accumulate soulless omnipoints that mean any number of things that don't necessarily improve your quality of life. HOWEVER, there's a potential for positive behavior modification through ubiquitous tracking.
On the other hand, we have a wild and fanciful future where you never have to read a bad book because everything you've read and watched has been tracked, logged, and analyzed by incredibly accurate recommendation engines. Everything I encounter is tailor-made to maximize my enjoyment specifically - and all for the small price of embedded ads. HOWEVER, I can no longer finish playing a game and trade it for my friend's finished game because, unless I register the game, I can't earn points. And, of course, my friend registered it because, without earning points, why bother playing the game?
Bottom line is it's a brave new world and we can't really tell where it's going to end up. It may be oppressive and commercial, it may be a utopian, pleasure-maximized dreamworld. But it will be based on the millions of decisions made along the way - so just try and be mindful of the consequences, I guess.
However, I think Schell goes a little over the top towards the end though- won't humans be sick of all the gaming? There are some information they'd want to use to game, other information they want to keep private. Also, I don't think there'd be that many real-world benefits attached to data mined off people: they'd always find a way to cheat then.
Awesome talk. He points out a number of psychological hooks that games are now using to interweave real life. And takes that to its logical conclusion (I won't spoil what this is) which actually seems mostly plausible and maybe even welcome to me -- given that one is able to anonymously opt-out of all the games/location-data publishing.
Well, this person needs our special attention. We sholud protect the society from all this "opt-outs".
I can't tell if it was inspiring or intensely dystopic.
I can already imagine the anti-point backlash and the giant secretive forums for gaming the system.
His plan for a better future is mindlessly optimistic: everybody is observed -> everybody behaves better. Apart from being bad in and of itself, it is actually pretty unlikely to come about in any way like he described (if you think about it), and it is fairly insidious to place it on an equal footing, rhetorically with all the other outcomes.
The reality is that people are having their own psychology increasingly 'gamed' by corporations and this is not a good thing. I predict that the ready supply of instant gratification will be as or more harmful than fast food and the obesity epidemic. One day we may find an easy way to overcome or sidestep our unwanted proclivities (assuming we're still in charge of ourselves enough to make this happen) and that will be a different story, albeit possibly an extremely dull one.
Somewhat ironic as he's just giving the viewer 'what they want' - a positive message.
The swiss army kitchen knife cracked me up, however!
His point, as I understood it, was to encourage the people in that room (ie the people who actually design the games we all play) to take the responsibility for making this coming world more than just commercialized crap. He starts that section talking about how much opportunity there is in current points systems, and encourages skilled designers to move in that direction and influence the shape of the field.
He doesn't express it as clearly as he might, but I believe that was the goal of his talk.
Anyhow, back to current topic, I too see his predicted future as a bad thing. It is a scientific fact that people are fairly easily manipulated by certain reward schemes[1]. With current technology, marketing people are getting good at applying those theories. With all due respect to honest people doing a job, those people don't give a shit about making the world a better place.
1. Sorry, I'm too lazy to dig up papers. Basically frequent small rewards given over randomized intervals are extremely compelling to people. This theory is applied to (or explains the success of) many gambling games.
Watch a Prius driver, they just drive differently from the rest.