Gaming. The Battle for our future. (Cue dramatice thunder)

I'm torn.  I've watched Jane McGonagal's lecture on how Gaming can save our future, on how it can make us better people, and I've seen Seth Priebatsch's lecture on the way we'll be creating a level of gaming directly on top of our culture over the next few years.  I really love this idea, because, you know, reality is kind of boring as hell.  Gaming has the potential to create an augmented reality, a hypereality lumped on top of our own that can, and indeed is, exciting and may make us better human beings.

Pictured:  Reality.

The problem I have is this, and it shows in Priebatsch's lecture a little, but it is completely ignored in McGonagal's: that games are a great way to make money.  Off of you.  While you're playing.  It costs 15 bucks a month to keep a WoW account, and in 2008 they had 10 Million subscribers.   10 million people they have to keep playing.  10 Million people they need to keep playing in order to continue to sleep on pillows made of money.  Money they can use to buy cocaine, and possibly hookers.  So in to fund their hypothetical cocaine addictions, they turn to sneaky, underhanded ways to keep you playing.

All businesses, once they get to be too big and profitable, will eventually start using less than reputable techniques to control your money, but if this business is going to be built on top of the very fabric of reality, then they will, in effect, control your entire life.

As Spike Lee once said, "if you can control the media, you control the country" (or something very much to that effect--google it), so if this new media will be our entire reality, what kind of ethics can we expect from the companies controlling our interactive media?