"Disturbing Presentation" Hits Target?
This video of a presentation made by game designer Jesse Schell at the February DICE Summit is making a bit of a splash. It’s a pretty powerful presentation, even being called “The Most Disturbing Presentation of the Year” by Morgan Peck in the IEEE Spectrum and many other sites (Google it for kicks). In the video, Schell gives his vision of a possible future, driven by games pretty much (even literally) every step of our days.
Quite a few things struck me about this video:
Life Is a Game?
On the surface that sounds OK, but if my health insurance company is going to give me credit for walking instead of driving, what happens when I drive? What if it happens while suffering from pneumonia and it’s the only way to get juice? Simplifying my life into a game of pong will not yield honesty.
Experts Aren’t Doing the Work
While giving some examples of such games already in place, Schell has an almost throw-away comment about how they weren’t built by game developers. This is something I’ve experienced as well, as companies seek one-size-fits-many employees to wear an army of hats. Sure, it’s easier for them to just hire a few employees instead of the army needed, but the results will be inefficient, redundant, and ultimately ineffective results. Yet it happens all the time, especially in the technical field, as people are expected to know many, many languages. And because they’re not fluent, the work takes longer, reworks are inevitable, and the medium takes a few steps back.
“Jesus is coming! Look busy!”
The thought that we’ll change our habits because someone may review them is pretty disturbing. Who cares if everyone listens to classical music and watches PBS if it’s a lie? What happened to integrity? I think, personally, this bothers me most of all. It’s like plastic surgery for the soul. In his post, Peck points to this as cause for comfort, saying that Schell “contorts his theory into a miraculous bit of optimism, imagining a future so documented and monitored that humanity is compelled to clean up its act…” With all due respect, lying because Future Big Brothers are watching is no way to live a life.
This reminds me of a time when comedian Andrew Dice Clay was getting a lot of bad press for crude, misogynistic humor. People protested his performances and many debates got overheated. Should he be banned, or allowed to do his thing because he was merely exercising his freedom of speech?
One writer suggested the best reality would be if he was allowed to do what he wanted, but nobody wanted what he did. To me that was gold. Like John Lennon’s “Imagine” on steroids, a world where everything was legal, including guns, fatty foods, despicable TV, racism, Hummers, etc., and yet, we simply decided we wanted to walk to the store to buy some fruit to eat while reading Salinger, even thought no one was watching. I guess I’m a dreamer.