The Coming Gamepocalypse
There has been an explosion of location based games recently. Talking about services where you use your phone to report in to a network about where you currently are. Then you can earn points or prizes from the businesses nearby. The businesses are happy to do it since the games are likely to keep you coming back. And the game developers figure that you may want to live in a world where you’re constantly living a video game.
We talked to Jesse Schell about this. He’s a on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Jesse foresees what he calls a “gamepocalypse” coming where your whole day is a series of video games. Your toothbrush will report in wirelessly to a computer network on how good of a job you did brushing. Your cereal box will let you earn points and discounts for eating more cereal and recommending it to your friends. And that’s just breakfast.
Jesse says the upshot of all these games will be that our great great grandchildren will know exactly who we were: what we watched, what products we used, how we behaved, because everything is stored on a hard drive somewhere and retrievable.
Sometimes our show really puts the “tense” in “Future Tense”. As in: the thought of my great great grandkids knowing how much time I spent watching American Idol makes me quite tense.
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