It's almost as if the speakers and panelists at South by South West 2010 had all prepared together beforehand. Time and again, no matter what the topic of the panel, the same theme came up again and again:
Gaming is where it's at.
From the more obvious cases, like Dennis Crowley's location-based Foursquare app (effectively a multi-player game replete with rewards and badges), to the more esoteric, like crowd-source astrology platform GalaxyZoo, more and more examples of game-based platforms are popping up. While it's clear that certain web-based services can benefit from a game-like component given that typical incentive structures simply aren't there (like the social need to be recognized as a "local", represented in Foursquare as becoming "Mayor" of a particular place), it gets really interesting if/when applied to other examples. Like tacking on a game component to a hospital's internal report tracking system to encourage nurse diligence, or rewarding taxi cab drivers for picking up fares on time, or rewarding kids for reading newspaper articles online - the list is endless, which I have to admit is slightly scary. In the Augmenting Maps with Reality panel, one of the audience members asked what the endgame (pun intended) of this "life as a game" is meant to be: will every part of our lives be represented as a game? Will I be competing - with myself or others - when I go shopping for groceries (10 points for buying kale!), buy a drink at the bar (minus 5 points for the carbs), or meet 3 new people in one day (You've received the social butterfly badge!)? The panelists' answers were mixed: Dennis Crowley thought it was totally fine that social interactions are rewarded through a game platform, while Flickr information architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea felt that games are an intermediate step - that a world where we need such explicit, constant incentives to do basic activities is likely the poorer for it. Casey Stengel's quote, "Most games are lost, not won" comes to mind, along with apocalyptic visions of our Pacman-like future. Thoughts? Is gaming here to stay, and if so, is it a good thing?