Recently, I had a voice over coaching session with Elaine Clark and mentioned my relatively new interest in voicing educational toys and games.
One thing led to another, and Elaine brought up the explosion of social media gaming and its impact on the industry at large. Games like Facebook’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars are far less complex than their console counterparts in a number of ways, including the complexity (or lack there of) of characters. Long story short, gaming scripts with one-word utterances like “Yeah!” and “Watch out!” are making a comeback.
Jesse Schell, CEO & Creative Director at Schell Games. Illustration by Justin Wood
That VO anecdote aside, a few days later I came across an article in Fast Company Magazine that surely piggybacked off of Elaine’s intel. Author Adam L. Penenberg penned (get it? Penenberg penned?) an article about “How Video Games Are Infiltrating–and Improving–Every Part of Our Lives.”
The article discusses in vast detail how we’ve become a nation of gaming experts (think Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers here) and the manner in which companies like Cisco, UPS, IBM and even the military are using that expertise to train, motivate, and reward employees via video games.
Penenberg’s intro focused on Jesse Schell‘s talk at the 2010 DICE Summit last February, where Schell told a crowd of 400 people that games are going to invade real life. Say what?!
In his talk at DICE, Schell predicted that technology will take the recent, previously unfathomable success of games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars to the next level. These games–and those like them–have reward systems directly wired to our psychologies, and many of them have even become a regular part of our realities.
Forget points for social media games; at some point, Schell stated, we’ll earn points for everything we do–from brushing our teeth to playing the piano–accumulating enough points to win prizes from the likes of Colgate or the National Endowment for the Arts.
It’s not that far-fetched: we’ve already got Fantasy Football, Geo Catching, Weight Watchers’ point system, and even the virtual plant that grows in the hybrid’s dash when the driver uses little gasoline.
Dash (with virtual plant) of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid
Schell explored this idea as it relates to the future of mass consumerism, which reminded me of a post I wrote on a previous blog in 2006.
I foresee a Google that’s married its precision advertising to Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, thereby nailing down mass-customization. A conversation with producer and videographer Gordon Lake went something like this: imagine sitting at a table in a restaurant. Google has partnered with this restaurant (just as it has a multitude of other properties in the public sphere) and activated its technologies. Voice recognition systems identify that you and I are the individuals sitting at this particular table, which is accompanied by a transparent sheet that drapes from the ceiling. Suddenly, advertisements appear on the transparent sheet targeted precisely at me. And simultaneously, there are ads targeted towards you. The supermarket’s running a sale on that one salsa…good to know – it’s my favorite and the one I purchase most often! My favorite band has a show at the Riv in two weeks; I can buy tickets at any time if I say, “buy tickets now.” (Not only does Google track my consumer behavior; its systems also constantly update my bank account and credit card information). This isn’t a system of mass-customization; it’s completely personalized…the system relies on individual demo-/psychographics and purchasing habits to specifically target ads at the respective consumer, regardless of whether they are ads for items that the person regularly purchases or recommendations for other items based on the individual’s information in the database. Will there not come a point when the consumer’s buying habits are the direct product of the personalized advertising itself–a point at which he/she no longer has a personal opinion, but rather one that’s been propagated by the system?
I went on to argue–obviously very pessimistically–that, if media has such power, it also has a moral and ethical obligation to certain ideals.
I’m much more of a the-glass-is-at-least-half-full kind of gal these days, but I loved the optimism pouring from Penenberg’s article just as much as I did Schell’s statement that, if game systems are designed right, they’ll inspire us to choose to be better people.
Check out the video of Jesse Schell’s “Beyond Facebook” talk at the 2010 DICE Summit here.