I’m falling down a rabbit hole again.
This one’s good, though.
Some thoughts: social games are addictive, worthless meth; serious games is now merging with gamification, and high profile enough for NESTA to notice; gamification has its own summit; people are finally listening to Jane McGonigal; and soon, this stuff will be everywhere.
There are trends, and there are trends. Mobile is changing the way people live their lives and communicate; games are both destroying lives, trapping people in an endless pleasure feedback loop, and saving the planet. Concepts from gaming are being applied all over the place to keep our dwindling attention spans engaged and to entrap us in the web of stickiness that comes from badges, levels, karma and upvotes.
Underneath it all, though, it’s psychology, sociology, the collective wisdom of years of game research and some nifty inventive creative thinking.
Two worlds are colliding: experience design and game design. Games aren’t just AAA titles with 3D shaders, realistic physics and gunshots. The boundary between games and experiences is becoming so indistinct that perhaps we’ll see the advent of grind games, jobs which have become mindlessly fun, as a reality instead of just a fiction.
I’m excited. Are you?