[Air-L] Visions of the Gamepocalypse (Jesse Schell SALT talk)

Santosh Kumar santoshkumar at gmail.com
Wed Jul 28 22:37:31 PDT 2010


*Jesse Schell (Author of The art of game design
http://artofgamedesign.com/) gave a talk as part of  their seminars
about long term thinking (SALT)
http://www.longnow.org/seminars/ . Stewart brand wrote the transcript. It
turns out that our future is constant play, and we may well be passing our
WOW avatars on to our children and grandchildren. How’s that for a heirloom?
*

*-----------------------------*



In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are
reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition
of "gamepocalypse---where every second of your life you're playing a game in
some way.  He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us
good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing
ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams
has worked.



The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense
of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a
chance to satisfy curiousity, a chance to solve problems, and a great
feeling of freedom.



Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the
future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors,
because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our
predictions are right or wrong.  He feels confident in predicting a number
of driving forces that will make games subsume all other media and occupy
ever more of real life.  They are:



* Nooks & crannies---new niches for games in people's time, in specialty
groups, in various world cultures.



* Microtransactions---which will really take off when they blend with social
networking.



* New sensors---tilty smart phones are a glimpse of what disposable sensors
everywhere might bring.



* New screens---live displays on everything.



* REM-tainment---lucid dreams as a play field.



* AdverGaming---commercialization money drives powerful innovation.



* Beauty---everything is getting goreous.



* Customization---you can already get personalized M&Ms.



* Eye and face tracking---universal face recognition is coming, and so is
having your avatar reflect your real-face expressions.



* The curious will win---games so reward curiosity and fast learning that
the incurious will be left behind.



* Authenticity---"real" constantly pushes toward* real*.



* Social networking---Facebook!



* Transmedia worlds---Pokémon showed the way, embracing a game, TV, cards,
and toys.



* Speech recognition---soon you will have to persuade a computer charactor
to do something.



* Geotracking---the real world becomes the screen.



* Sharing---Wikipedia showed its power.



* Quantitative design---detailed real-time analysis of what works in games
drives exquisite adaptation.



* Extrinsic rewards---gold stars everywhere, but Schell recommends the
book*Punished by Rewards
* and believes that intrinsic rewards are better to promote because they
last.



* Whole life tracking---the endpoint is immersion.  Hopefully in what James
Carse calls "the infinite game"---where the point is not in winning but in
always improving the game.



Asked in the Q&A about short versus long games, Schell noted that massive
multiplayer games have such scale and scope and offer such endless new goals
and progress along with their social intensity that World of Warcraft now
has 10 million players.  We may well be passing our avatars on to our
children and grandchildren.



                                        --Stewart Brand

-- 



Stewart Brand -- sb at gbn.org

The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/



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