The Most Disturbing Presentation of the Year

It has something to do with Jesse Schell and breakfast cereal.

Mon Apr 5, 2010 08:35 AM ET | content provided by Morgan Peck, IEEE Spectrum

I invite you to take a journey with game designer Jesse Schell as his mind goes for a little stroll in the near future. He gave a talk in February 2010 at the DICE summit that is being called the most disturbing presentation ever. I'd like to keep open the possibility of getting my mind equally blown somewhere down the line. So, I'm only going as far as to call it the most disturbing presentation of the year.

In Jesse Schell's future we will still shop, eat cereal, brush our teeth and watch TV. But everything we do and (more importantly) all the information we attend to will win us points and benefits across a vast incentives network engineered by corporations and government entities. Or, more tersely: we will live in a game. Two things need to happen for this future to arrive.

Technology, specifically sensors, must become disposable and ubiquitous.
Companies need to hire game designers and put them in charge of marketing schemes.

Throughout the video, Schell dips down into the present to point out how close we already are to living in a game. Sensors are all over the place and are becoming more sophisticated every day as new products come out like the body movement tracker, Natal, for the XBox. And a working point system is already there for game designers to build upon and integrate. Earning frequent flier miles is just a beginning.

video at link

http://news.discovery.com/tech/jesse-schell-disturbing-presentation.html

Brave New World....

One online location for a needlework design company's website and forum offers points for signing up for stitch-a-longs (SALs) for designs they sell, points for posting pictures of the progress on the projects, points for finishing the project (with pictures) and points if the project is entered in a needlework show. Of course, it is a blatant way to encourage people to buy the design and the products needed to stitch it, it encourages keeping up with the stitching so the project does not get abandoned, and the group pressure encourages finishing and display, giving free advertising to the design group. And the sense of accomplishment also promotes signing up for another project...

SALs in the needlework world are turning into a major share of that small market and may even foster a revival in the interest in embroidery. While that would be a good thing for me as a stitcher, I don't really get into it.

I'll be the isolated old coot who watches the world go to shit around him and who gets to be euthanized listening to Beethoven when he's finally had enough. :D

Brave New World indeed. With the mentality of so many Americans, it's really not that hard to look into the future and image people easily going along with this "game" idea.