two links I clicked (boring title is boring)

[marcicat]

1. (Originally linked through dira’s dreamwidth.) Jane McGonigals TED talk* “Gaming Can Make a Better World.”

Conceptually, I thought this was interesting. Leveraging the talents of gamers to solve real-world problems — seems clever, if a bit vague on the details. But about 17 minutes into the video, she starts talking about games they’ve been testing. The first one was about an oil shortage — 1700 people participated by entering their actual real-life data and receiving back fake information about gas prices, videos of riots, and more.

Okay, so my first thought was “haven’t they made this movie already?” (Wag the Dog, Inception) My second thought was that this was deeply, deeply creepy. So, you immerse people in a virtual world, with imaginary rewards and consequences, and use that to change their real world behavior?

And let’s say someone signs up for this voluntarily, because they’re trying to stop smoking, or travel more, or whatever. Okay, cool. But what if that game is perpetrated upon us, without our consent? I mean, I haven’t actually *been* to Egypt to see the demonstrations for myself. I’m just taking the world’s word for it.

(*In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve only ever seen two TED talks online, and I found both of them kind of creepy.)

2. The Form of the Book, and its Aura (notes from a lecture by James Bridle)

Books, ebooks, and social reading. Although I have no particular dedication to Open Bookmarks itself, this had a lot of interesting stuff in it, especially in the light of the delicious kerfluffle.

“Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work.” (David Shields, ‘Reality Hunger’)

I liked the article, and in many ways, I think the internet has already solved the “problems” he talks about. Fanworks, comments, icons, delicious pinboard, AO3…

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.