Breakfast of Champions – Jesse Schell talks about how games will dominate our lives in the future

April 17th, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

Breakfast tomorrow may be quite a ride.

That’s because in the future, technology and games will permeate every facet of our lives. At breakfast, you won’t need to turn on your PC to play computer games against friends. You won’t even need to turn on your iPhone. All you’ll need to do is turn over your box of cornflakes. Instead of boring factoids or the same old maze, this box will come packed with its own computer, games, wifi and motion sensors.

Or so says Professor Jesse Schell of Carnegie Mellon University, in a recent presentation at DICE 2010. In a jam-packed 27 minutes, Schell looks at surprising recent trends in the gaming industry, including the enormous popularity and profitability of Farmville, Club Penguin, Webkinz, MafiaWars, Guitar Hero and consoles such as the Wii and Wii Fit. Driving the success of these games are what he calls “psychological tricks”, but also a common sense of realism. In a modern world surrounded by fake experiences, he argues that these games appeal to our hunger for authentic experience.

Schell then notes how almost every company from airlines to Weight Watchers currently use points systems and games in one way or another. This, he says, is only the beginning. With the proliferation of cheap technology, companies will one day fill every aspect of our lives with games to increase profitability.

Sound like crass commercialization? Maybe, says Schell, but by recording everything we do it might also inspire us to be better people. Whatever happens, it will certainly make breakfast more interesting!

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Sami Sundell

This might also be another divider that creates a generation gap. Even though many of us are ready to use bonus cards, log in Foursquare etc. to get some silly rewards, are we really ready to open up our whole lives?

There has already been some uproar about services that make already public data more accessible (see http://33bits.org/2010/04/05/is-making-public-d… for some examples) – people have been either ignorant or thought their data will be hidden in the mass, and then get annoyed when that proves to not be the case.

However, what about the children! For the younger generation, being immersed in social media is an essential part of their daily lives – they may prove to be more open-minded than us old folks who dabble with Twitter and Facebook but never really live it. For future generations, it may be more than ok to have their cereals talking to each other, even about their private lives. The interesting question is, is that a good thing, and will there be a backlash?