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?

Visual Symbols

We all have some symbols that we immediately recognize as being important, or at least meaning something:  the dollar sign, McDonald's M's, traffic lights, those little Jesus fishes that people stick to their cars.  They all mean something to all of us collectively, but we each have our own personal visual symbols that speak to us on a more intimate level than our greater cultural symbols.  So i stopped and thought about some of my own visual symbols, and these are just a few of what I came up with:

Pic by Tom Morgan.

The Digital Envelope.
This symbol--and its one we probably all recognize--is now synonymous with almost all of our communication:  e-mail, text, voicemail, etc, and in our increasingly technological and connected world, this little symbol is the most likely one we are to see when someone is trying to communicate with us. 






The Gas Gauge:

Photo by Jackson Carson: 
I think there's a metaphor in there, too.

The gas gauge is pretty strange, in that it symbolizes a number of different things. The first and most cynical is poverty.  Or, rather that everything costs something, and it often takes money, or at least a continued investment, to keep things running.  It also holds a deep emotional resonance, as the gas gauge is a physical representation of anxiety and worry.  I rely on my car to get to school, work, and everywhere else I need to go, and there have been more than a few times when I've had to white-knuckle the steering wheel while I stare down at the orange gas light and empty gauge.  Even now, whenever I get behind the wheel of my car, I get that quick pang in the pit of my stomach, that little arrowhead of worry still stuck in my guts.



The Low Battery Light:

Photo by Matt Thomas.  Mine doesn't have a dead bird,
that might be a little too much even for me.

While I picked out the low battery icon as a purely visual symbol, I have to admit that my phone, as much of an ancient brick as it is, is an amazing barometer for my life.  My phone is tied immediately to my current stress level.  It reminds me that it is impossible to truly get away, and is a constant reminder of things I have to do, and many times, it is the way those things are delivered.  The more busy I am the more I use it, and it shows.  When I get busy, i often forget to charge it, and so I've had many nights trying to finish a project, and my phone will sit on my desk, a chirping, stalwart brick, reminding me that though I'm busy, I, like my phone, will eventually run out of juice, and will need to be recharged.  I can take that metaphor in stride, but it is the mornings I wake up after two or three hours of sleep. I reach for my phone, bleary-eyed and still exhausted, to silence the horrible alarm sounds, only to find the little battery icon is still a few bars short, in a sickly yellow or amber shade, and I have to shudder at how eerily accurate the symbolism has become.

The Machine is Changing Us.

I stumbled on this guy (Michael Wesch, yeah, this guy) through our old buddy Andrew Marcinek (You remember him, right? From my last post?) and I've found that Dr. Wesch is way, way smarter.  In this video, and on his YouTube Channel, Mike Wesch examines how technology is changing the way we view the world, how we create our very selves, and because we create, on some level, our selves, the search for authenticity, for what we really are is now making us narcissistic and "fragmented." Because the world is now manufacturing content directly for us, for free, all around the world, and accessible at any time, how could you not believe that the world was built for you?  Especially amazing is the series of clips of first time vloggers, and how self conscious they are.  (check out at 20:21, where a girl wants to place a face on her computer that will react to what she's saying.  If that doesn't tug your heartstrings, I just don't think you're really human.)
Check this puppy out.


So anyway, now that you've watched that, I'm thinking about what that means for us.  Now that we create ourselves as a virtual persona, or at least look for ourselves out there, on the 'ole interwebs, why should that end in the classroom?  Why shouldn't teachers network with their students, if that's where their students live their lives?  What better way is there to reach kids, and mold kids, than to meet them where they are actively creating themselves?

I'm not sure if I see anything wrong with that.

Photo from Creative Commons.