TLDR: We’ve got an SXSW panel in the running. Vote for us!
I was with some friends today, and had one of those curious moments where the zeitgeist seems to manifest before you, and remind you that it’s no longer the 90s. There was substantial indecision amidst a conversation, and to provoke some sort of choice, someone chimed in and said, “Click yes or no.” We’ve known that computers are no longer the strict domain of nerds for a while now, but it’s still a cool splash in the face when an average joe makes references to modal dialog boxes in everyday conversation.
It goes well beyond computers, of course, which is really why I bring this up. Technology is, naturally, just a medium; kids today don’t even refer to it as the internet, they just refer to specific applications like Facebooking and Google Mapping it. And without even looking at the market research data, you’re going to accept it when I say that games are one of the more applications going. Along with Google, Photoshop, and lolcats, the underpinnings of gaming have seeped into the vernacular and the popular unconscious.
While some worry about how games might subsume everyday life, others prefer to flip the premise: could games augment everyday life? Looking at youth, who are presumably amongst the more malleable minds, researchers have found that doomsday predictions of obese pork chops spending 25 hours a day glued to the screen haven’t really panned out. It turns out that people are pretty good at extracting the value from mediated systems, and applying it IRL, without getting hopelessly lost in the shiny. The implication is that as our culture becomes more enraptured by gaming, the possibility is large that game-like systems will increasingly inform our way of living, rather than replace it.
Some thinkers were calling for games as a mechanism for enriching culture 50 years ago. Constant Nieuwenhuys called for “unforeseen games” that make “inventive use of material conditions” as a means to humanize urban spaces. In the developed world, our problems are more mental than material, and we’ve banked a lot on our capacity to advance intellectually and spiritually. Games present systems that seek to solve complex, abstract problems — and they do so in a way that uplifts us emotionally. If that’s going to inform our way of living, it could be a big deal.
And that’s why we’ve got an SXSW panel in the running, on this very topic: Our Game Could Be Your Life. We’ve teamed up with some other fantastic pervasive game designers to put this thing together, so it’s going to be pretty wild if it gets accepted.
