How many points am I worth?

A few months back, I had developed an interest in game development - primarily driven by my mobile device interests. Not having had a prior experience in gaming (except in playing), I thought it would be wise to read up on the subject. After some research, I honed in on The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. I am glad I did.

The book itself is not about a how-to on gaming that provides code snippets and exercises but really more on what gaming is and how to develop a mindset towards gaming. Jesse, I learned later, is a professor in Carnegie Mellon University and teaches gaming there. The book is quite fascinating and builds incrementally. Jesse also throws in a number of 'lenses' through which one should look at a gaming problem, with each lens providing a different perspective to the challenge of creating a game. I would strongly suggest that you pick a copy even if you have no inclination to develop games, as many of the concepts transcend gaming.

The fondest memories of my childhood always involved one game or the other, be it cricket with the local kids, pretending like Captain Kirk and playing Star Trek with clay models of "transponders" that me and my cousin used to make, or my and my friend inventing our own games (like 'Alphacross') and spending countless hours in the patio playing it. I think games add an element of fun to learning that is otherwise absent, and for some reason, we seem to forget this fundamental concept along the way and treat games as distractions instead.

Cut to present time - I got a weekly update from TED on non-TED presentations around the web last week and one of the updates was a presentation by Jesse Schell at the DICE 2010 conference about gaming in our lives.

DS Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

I think it is a fascinating speech. While it starts a bit slowly, he ends with a bang that I think is more profound than what it seems to be on the outside. Essentially, Jesse claims that many concepts of gaming are already a part of our lives whether we like it or not, and that we are seeing games integrated with our lives in more ways than one and in not-so-obvious forms. He foresees a day when pretty much all our activities will be games where we will earn points in one way or the other by playing 'life' games and more importantly, corporations have an interest in us doing so.

While we are while away from the slightly horrific world of us getting points for brushing well due to the gaps in technology required, I think we are already well into this world and much more than we would like to admit. We get points for traveling around the world to drinking coffee at the local Starbucks.

And I don't think it is just a vision for the future as well. The idea of using gaming can be used in the current real world in more ways than one - think of how much more your children will be interested in doing something if you can mimic the virtual world they are already more familiar with. Same can be done in companies to allow employees to open up and share their knowledge with fellow team members. Another major area where gaming can have a direct application, as Jesse mentions, is in health care. Building on what Wii Fit has shown us, we can leverage games and social media to have a healthy competition regarding our health and fitness.

At the end of the day, everyone wants to be recognized and feel special. Giving a game setting to a challenge can help achieve that easily and cheaply.

I can also not help make a connection between his future vision and an article that Vannevar Bush wrote in the 1940s. The article, "As we may think", is considered a seminal article on personalization. In the article, Bush envisions a time when we will have devices or mechanisms that will augment our memory and keep track of pretty much everything that we do. 70 years later, this still seems to hold true and we seem to be getting closer to his vision than ever!