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

natalya godbold ngodbold at gmail.com
Thu Jul 29 17:16:01 PDT 2010


I like games but I don't want to live my *life *on the basis of clear
progress and being offered feedback.  I love the complexity and occasional
stillness of life.
This is all a bit gee whiz to me.
I like the following typo:

* Beauty---everything is getting goreous.

Yes.  Its all so beautiful its/I'm just about bleeding.
n



On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Santosh Kumar <santoshkumar at gmail.com>wrote:

> *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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-- 
Natalya Godbold
PhD Candidate (Human Information Behaviour / Health Communication)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney





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