It’s an extremely interesting point that Jesse raises when talking about the application and connections to reality that these recently successful games have been making. Social media like Facebook, or Club Penguin, and the Xbox Achievements all have roots in a bigger picture besides what the player is experiencing while they play. With Mafia Wars, these people are playing against their own friends, taking the feeling of playing a game of football or Frisbee without having to leave your room and without having to leave our bubble of comfort. Farmville is the same sort of concept, in that the players are interacting with their friends and other farmers, looking to improve the position of their farms. In many other cases, games are trying to break that bubble of comfort as much as possible and reconnecting people with things they wouldn’t normally be able to do in their life but they may want to. The result? These games were wildly popular, and made tons of money.
Obviously the point that Schell is trying to make is that this phenomenon is something that game designers need to be paying attention to. The possibilities for stretching reality and immersing more and more people are astounding. I’m reminded of the 2009 film, Gamer, where people could take control of inmates and pit them against each other in brutal deathmatches. Could this be the future of gaming? Could social gaming go so far as to push people to want to brush with violent realism in their every day lives, when they get home from work or school?
If gamification reaches the points that Schell described, then an evolution from modern games into iterations such as what we see in Gamer this would be totally possible. While I don’t agree with the full extent of his predictions, there are certainly things that can be found now that can evolve soon to reach a state of gaming in everyday activity. A good example of this would be FourSquare, the website where a person checks in to a location every time they visit it, and connect with their friends and also see who has checked in to a location more. This is already something that’s happening right now! Go to work, check in, and receive experience points. Once you leave, driving home can net you experience as well. Predictably, people will find more enjoyment in games based off activities that already have potential for fun rather than simple tasks like brushing your teeth and drinking Dr. Pepper. But, the possibilities are endless.
With social media sites reeling more and more people into a world of gaming, first as casual gamers, there is more potential for this person to continue to play games and look for ways to implement games into their daily lives. Once these new opportunities for game design are realized by the community as a whole, and new technologies emerge and are prototyped, the possibilities for this community to make an impact on society as a whole will become widespread. The future may be a place where every aspect of the global culture is rooted in gaming.
