Continuing the gaming focus of the last post, I wanted to look at something that we will likely see in the near future of videogames: the conversion of everyday activity into a gaming context. We’ve already seen a few examples of this take place and it is a form of gaming that has yet to really emerge but one that will take off once the mainstream crowds are drawn into the addictive lure of turning everyday mundane actions into status-based achievements.

If it is the individual that creates meaning in their own lives, then could gaming be the catalyst for increasing motivation, analysing success or just plain ego gratification?

Before you think this concept is too far-fetched, let’s have a quick look at a few examples that have already attempted this in various ways. The most popular of these is FourSquare, a location check-in application that currently has over 6 million users.  The creator, Dennis Crowley, has gone on record stating that he was inspired by videogames, and this certainly shows as you collect badges depending on various milestones achieved – kind of like a social media boyscout troop.  From simple things such as your first check-in, to more complicated activities such as checking in to the same venue as 50 other people (which usually only occurs at web-focused conferences or expos) or whilst on a boat.   The more of these you collect, the more your social standing within the world of FourSquare increases and every badge received comes with a little sense of satisfaction.   Add to this the concept of becoming a ‘mayor’ of a venue (i.e. the person who checks in the most), which sometimes comes with certain perks like purchase discounts, and you can begin to see how the simple act of going through your daily motions has had an extra layer of ‘game’ placed over it.  FourSquare seems to be de-emphasising this gaming aspect over time; but it is undeniable that a large part of its initial appeal to users comes from these mechanics.

Moving on, mobile phones are now home to a number of applications that very specifically try to turn your life into one filled with experience points and levelling up. The appropriately named EpicWin is currently the main contender for this crown, and it is doing a pretty fine job of it.   Unlike the approach taken by FourSquare, which sees gaming elements applied in a more abstract manner, EpicWin directly and openly tries to turn your life into a videogame.  Here you level up a character – with traditional RPG stats such as strength, stamina and intellect – by assigning yourself tasks and completing them.   With each task or chore achieved, you receive a self-assigned amount of points and your character progresses along a map in the game – giving you a sense of accomplishment and encouraging you to be more productive.   Obviously such a system is easily broken, but to do so is to miss the entire point of the application and given that it is a solo experience (and therefore has no real sense of competition) there really is no incentive to do this.

It’s a great idea which unfortunately in this instance is still lacking somewhat, being little more than a glorified to-do list.  However, the proof of concept and market space (the application is not a free one, and is selling well) is there and from personal experience I can say that I was more productive whilst playing around with this application; although admittedly my interest in it waned after a week or two as it lacks the depth and reward structure to be truly engrossing.

Will we see ideas such as these become more varied and fleshed out in the future?  Absolutely and undoubtedly, and there is a simple reason why: economics.   The profit available from any product or platform online is in almost all instances directly proportionate to the amount of time that people spend using it, particularly when we are talking about social media applications.  The more time people spend on your platform the more your advertising space is worth or the more microtransactions you can convince people to purchase. For this reason alone, this blurring of the game/life divide will be explored; as the company that can successfully combine the addictiveness, competition and depth of a game like World of Warcraft with a real-world (socially acceptable and constantly used) utility and convince enough people to use it to achieve critical mass will be a multi-billion dollar organisation within a matter of months.

Consider Facebook and how widespread and addictive it already is.   Now think about how much more engaging a platform it would become if every time you uploaded a photo, made a status update, or wrote on somebody’s wall you were awarded points that went towards levelling up your profile through various rankings.  Or alternatively, if other people could give you points based upon your actions that they approved of (every ‘like’ gives you +1 to your popularity attribute; every time somebody shares one of your links +5 to your town-cryer skill).  They could even make it quite detailed, and have a class-based system which saw you level up different aspects of your profile based on certain activities (tagging friends in photos and videos adds to your ‘social mogul’ status; writing on other people’s walls levels up your ‘gossip queen’ rank). If you thought Everquest or World of Warcraft were insidious with their ability to addict millions; just think about what would happen if such a  reward system was implemented on Facebook!

Whether or not they would actually do this is highly debatable and at this stage of their success probably unnecessary, but somebody will try (if they haven’t already, I’m not sure if third-party Facebook applications can actually implement this) and eventually someone will succeed at gaining that critical mass necessary for this concept to become part of everyday life for many millions of people.

There are countless other possible examples of ways that your life could incorporate gaming elements to a greater or lesser extent.   Augmented reality applications, which have been discussed here on Future Conscience before, are a technically impressive way to do this and there are already a number of great examples of developers trying to re-envisage the way we view the streets and landmarks around us.

What will be very interesting to see is how competitive these systems become, which is to say they will prove more commercially successful the more they are able to implement interaction and a sense of ranking between players.   The vast majority of us are already inherently competitive when it comes to other people’s lifestyles and achievements, even if we are adept at masking it, and social media has shown that if you give people a platform to call out their own successes then they will use it – loudly.  Give them a platform where their successes are constantly collated and compared to others in real-time…?

I can easily foresee a future where gaming begins to fuse with our daily existence to such an extent that the two become almost indistinguishable.  It could even be to the extent that your ‘level’ or ‘attributes’ gained could directly impact the likelihood of succeeding at a job, college application or other such competitive placement.  If the system was externally dictated (i.e. tasks and points were not self-assigned), secure and non-exploitable, then your achievements within it would count for a lot more than a traditional game would and could be seen as a kind of curriculum vitae.  After-all, every level/skill/attribute would directly correlate to real-world experience, motivation and successful implementation.  It could act like a kind of independent life-auditing scheme, in which those who are active and succeed at life (according to the metrics of success set by the designers) are given higher levels/skills/attrubutes than those who do not meet these criteria.  As awful as that sounds, I really can see future attempts at implementing such a thing – the ramifications that we would have to consider if it were ever successful and widespread are grounds for another post entirely!

I clearly haven’t covered all of the possible manifestations of this idea – but they can be summed up in a simple dichotomy. Do we bring videogame tropes into various aspects of our life, or do we bring our life directly into the context of a videogame paradigm?  We’re definitely going to see many examples of the former emerge over the next few years and, whilst the second part of that equation may seem over-the-top and a bit ridiculous right now, only a few years ago many people would laugh at the idea of other people being allowed to publicly display photos of them drunk on the weekend to everyone in real-time (to bring out this overused example once more).

Things change, and they change with increasing speed in today’s technologically developed world.  Within five years we could be thinking about how we ever lived without our Starbucks coffee each morning providing us with 5 extra bonus points towards our loyalty attribute, a statistic which other non-related companies might use to then offer incentives to highly loyal customers to try their product too (yes, I can see the irony in that situation)… all of these things easily tracked through our universal personal device (previously known as a mobile phone) that never leaves our side and is even used to track our sleeping patterns (bonus experience in the partying skill for those who can stay out all night!  Bonus points in the dependability attribute for those who get up early for work).

Combining the rapidly growing sectors of social media, location software, augmented reality, professional productivity and mobile platforms with the ego-stroking peer group competition and carrot/donkey mechanics of massively multiplayer online gaming really isn’t that difficult to conceive of.  In fact, it seems like a match made in capitalist heaven.  We can be assured that it will be attempted on this scale at some stage – the real question is will it be widely accepted? And, if so, what will that mean for the construction of our social identities and personal understanding of self-worth?

For those of you not watching the Twitter feed (@FutureCon), I’ve been away on holiday for the last month and am just now getting back into the swing of things.  So apologies for the lack of posts recently, but let’s start things off with a bang.  Internet Kill Switches, how can we circumvent them?

Freedom of access to the global stream of consciousness that is the internet should be considered amongst the most important of human rights in this modern age where information is key to a completely integrated and flexible social experience.  Ensuring that governments around the world have little ability to control how, where and when we access this fundamental right should be a priority for those consciously striving to uplift the world as a unified whole.  With the current turmoil in Egypt, to name but one example (*cough* China *cough*), we have seen a very real and worrying example of just how much control nation states around the world are seeking to impose upon their citizens.  Even though the move by the Egyptian government has seemingly been reversed in recent days, it brings up a very important issue that needs to be addressed publicly and vocally: just what can be done to overcome any attempt by governments around the world to instigate an ‘Internet Kill Switch’ in the future?

The answers are surprisingly easy and readily available (although I have to admit being a bit uneducated as to much of the technical aspects involved), showing that the internet is already well and truly out of the control of any single government.  The problem comes from ensuring people are educated in how to access these connections rather than merely resorting to the easiest and most commonly available options such as broadband.

Dial-Up

How quickly we forget our humble beginnings.  Dial Up connections are still available and widely used around the globe, and all you need access to is a landline with long distance capability to overcome any locally imposed internet blackout.  As long as the long-distance phone lines are running (not always a certainty of course), you can get access to the internet.

This fundamental strength of the system was highlighted in Egypt and it is the ability for digital information to be sent over many different communication mediums that lies at the core of why it is so difficult for the internet to ever be completely taken away from us.   The first port of call for any attempt to sever public access to the internet is to get out your old modems (presuming you still have one), or kit yourself up with a mobile-phone based connection, and get onto the phone lines – just like we used to!

Radio

It is also possible to run digital networks via radio waves – in fact, this is exactly what is happening in most of our households through the wireless networks that are increasingly ubiquitous.  The question is: can something like this be set up on a larger, international scale?  There are a number of interesting projects in this regard, although the majority of them are focused on relatively small localities such as a metropolitan city.  However, with the right technological know-how and a large enough pool of participants to act as relay stations it is certainly possible to provide global network access purely through the use of radio-wave technology.  An interesting example of this is SailMail, which seeks to provide email services to international waters through the use of technology specifically catered towards low-bandwidth/high-latency mediums such as radio or satellite.  Leading us neatly onto our next category…

Satellite

Satellite internet has been available for some time now, and there are even moves to bring broadband speed access through a number of services mostly in the United States.  Obviously, the infrastructure required for such a connection is considerable – more so than any other option really – but certainly not out of reach of numerous organisations that might wish to ensure globally accessible internet.

The ability to bring down such access (once the satellite is in place) is incredibly difficult, and means that anybody with the ability to procure or create a satellite dish will be able to circumvent any kind of internet kill switch that might be put into place.  Given that we now have access to relatively cheap technology that can be used from any location, such as mobile satellite phones, this becomes an important part of the overall vision for a world in which the internet can never be unplugged.

Freedom ISPs

What is truly needed are non-profit, possibly even underground, organisations willing to produce the infrastructure necessary for global information clouds to perpetuate regardless of any co-ordinated attempt to stifle them.   There are many different ways to accomplish this; some of which have been discussed right here, others that I have undoubtedly overlooked (such as the need to ensure a constantly accessible set of IP addresses), and even those that have yet to emerge.  Through high-value individuals and organisations contributing their resources to such a cause, the viability of an internet kill switch becomes essentially impossible to enact completely.

It will require a great deal of money, knowledge and perseverance – but an internet that can never be shut down is essentially already here; all that is required now is to spread its presence and the ability for people in all areas of the globe to access it.  Doing this will require a great deal of resources, both financial and otherwise, coming in from somewhere.  The question now becomes who will step up to the task, and will they be able to withstand any attempt to bring them down.

Public Protest

What must never be forgotten, and what is proving to be the case increasingly around the world, is that united the citizen population can always overcome any form of blatant state oppression and attempts to stifle the sharing of information.  An important aspect of this is that a majority must be vocal and consistent with the message that political censorship of the internet should never play a role in any truly democratic and free society.  This means not only being vocal when it is too late and the attempt is already underway, but early enough to make sure that such an eventuality is never even truly considered as an option because the backlash that would occur is already well known.  What I’m talking about isn’t the kind of revolution that we are seeing in places such as Egypt, but rather a consistent and educated lobbying movement that hits home at the highest levels and has a vocal and erudite message to portray to the world’s media.

I’d love to hear from those of you better versed in the specifics of this technology, and please do correct any oversights or errors I may have made.  In particular, it would be great to hear of any grassroot initiatives that are attempting to ensure such a human right continues to be accessible for the largest number of people possible.  With current discussions even in the United States (self-proclaimed bastion of free speech) surrounding just how the internet could be muzzled, it is certainly more important than ever to ensure that as a collective we move faster and further than any oppressive elements are able to.

Thankfully, this already seems to be the case and the cat is well and truly out of the bag – but now those of us lucky enough to be assured such access need to consider how we might contribute to widening that access to the largest number of people around the world.  The future of humanity depends a great deal on a collective source of information, debate and international organisation of people; so we must not become complacent and allow ourselves to ignore any attempt to take this unifying gift away from us.