There's two talks I want to outline in this post:
This DICE 2010 talk,
and this TED talk.
The DICE talk first focuses on the rise of facebook and the near-constant supply of surprises the gaming industry has had over the past 10 years. But the real interesting part is about halfway through, where he starts talking about the use of psychological tricks to compel desired behavior.
Later in the talk, he begins discussing about how integration of these same tricks into our day-to-day lives could result in a similar behavior alteration. The example I find most comepelling is the plant "pet" on the HUD of a hybrid that grows when you drive in a manner that conserves the most gasoline.
It's this integration of psychological tricks that illustrates some very interesting possibilities for the future of our economy. Imagine, instead of a card that tracks your purchases and offers you discounts immediately, a grocery store that keeps your "profile" saved in a database, through your use of voluntary information input, or debit card transactions. Behavior can be altered by awarding "points" to a particular consumer based on what they buy, and can use those points to receive free items, or some other such desirable reward, and the reward can only be obtained by following a desired behavioral pattern, such as patronizing a certain brand, signing up to give out more information for the store to sell, or anything else the business wants a consumer to do.
Given my proximity to advertising, it's not a particularly substantial leap of faith to predict that advertisers will begin implementing systems to manipulate these basic human evolutionary quirks in order bring out a higher level of consumerism. Of course, this is simply business-to-consumer; business-to-business is already primarily relationship-based, so this technique would seems redundant in those channels.
Behavior modification, while the hallmark of good advertising, also seems to suggest a frightening trend of invasiveness into the lives of consumers. It remains to be seen whether the use of this technique will be used in a way consistent with the typical advertising code of ethics, or if it will be used in exploitative and harmful ways, ultimately requiring the use of more legislation. Only time will tell.
On a lighter note, the TED talk is about how gamers are going to influence the world. Consoles are currently being developed to run off low power, and use wireless telecommunications signals to create a new generation of gamers in India, China, and other less-prosperous nations. The expected addition to the gaming population at the end of the deployment of that technology is around one billion people.
In short, the talk is about how our perception of online worlds are more idyllic than our perception of the real world, and so we escape to those virtual places. However, in these virtual spaces, we build a variety of skills that translate well to the real world, more specifically, enacting positive change in the real world.
So, that additional one billion gamers will result in a massive human resource that can be used to help the world, according to McGonigal. So, it essentially boils down to her opinion that gaming can save the world. For serious.
What do you think? Are games going to ultimately lead us to a world where we can all integrate and help those less fortunate, or is it more realistic to presume that companies will exploit the psychological tricks in advertising to make more money, for good or ill?
again, and because of my thirst for nerdy, useless information, I usually read a game's wiki for stuff I may have glossed over.
on Korea?
, which, while no slouch, is almost three years old.
as a cheap supercomputer, you'll want to stay away from the
compliant with DX 9.0c. The PS3 uses OpenGL, so I don't know what constraints a developer has placed on them with that API.
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