Playing games with our future
This is a must-watch video. It’s a presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. A veteran game designer, he is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He speaks about how games have taken on an ever important part of our lives. Going beyond classic gamers, games today(e.g. Farmville, Mafia Wars, Webkids, etc.) are the cognitive chewing gum for marketers, both for their psychological appeal as well as their stickiness. Taken to an extreme, this can look pretty scary. Schell ends the speech on a relatively positive note with a call to arms for game developers to step up and take responsibility for the future of the game narrative in our lives. Seems like that will be a tough road when up against Coke, Nike, Kellogg’s and Disney.