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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

I strongly believe that Game Mechanics are going to be huge on the order of magnitude of social or mobile.

Can you imagine what would happen if Zynga took their playbook and decided to build a weight-loss startup (the market for weight loss products in the US alone is $35 billion/year). Not to mentions the dozen of other billion-dollar self-help industries that can be transformed with game mechanics.

Sooner or later life is going to be like a MUD with standardized ways of measuring skills and comparing yourself against your friends. In a couple of generations time kids will grow up talking about "levelling up" in real life skills.

The application of game mechanics to real-life is only just beginning and it's going to have a huge transformative effect on how people live their lives.

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On a related note, today I have found the answer to the weight loss problem. There is a certain type of pine nut from China that kills your taste buds if you eat it raw, making everything that you eat taste very bitter (taste buds normally die and regrow every week or so, so it's not permanent).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut#Risks_of_eating_pine_n...

Why would the kids of this generation or the next few prefer to play real life vs virtual life? If anything, technologies in the future will allow one to better enjoy the virtual experience, complete with realistic sensations and freedom to modifying their world and create their own adventure. All for $9.99 a month.

Remember, real life is tough. Clicking a mouse is easy.

Because nobody in real life is impressed by your level 160 elf mage.

Why do you need to impress people?

Much of our behavior in everyday life is driven by how we present ourselves to others.

Hmm. I would think the entrepreneurs on this board would not care what others think. Since they would appear to others to be losers who haven't had a steady income for 3 years and borrow money from parents and relatives to code the next game that would get people addicted on clicking on buttons.

They care what other entrepreneurs, investors, customers, etc. think.

When most people say "I don't care what other people think", it's not really true. It just indicates a mismatch with the audience under discussion.

I know lots of entrepreneurs who don't care what others think of themselves. And their client/customers/investors don't care as long as the product is good.

Look at Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg; you think they care what others think of themselves as a person?

Look at Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg; you think they care what others think of themselves as a person?

You mean like the zuck arranging to announce a $100M donation live on oprah a week before the social network hit theaters?

The original point doesn't even have to do with whether you want to impress others. It has to do with your users' motivations - that's what matters.

Why would anybody want to spend their life lengthening a a virtual progress bar in an online game? I don't know, but there it is.

Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Machinarium, Flower, etc have no progress bars.

I'm not familiar with those games, but I'll bet they don't have level 160 elf mages either. What they all do probably have, like most games, is some sense of progress or accomplishment that has nothing to do with the real world.

Check out Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" for an entire book based around this concept -- if life in the virtual world is so much more fun than reality, surely we'll see full-on migrations to 100% virtual existence (caveat the baseline necessities to maintain vitality).

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