An interview with Gamepocalypse blogger, game designer, and Carnegie Mellon University professor Jesse Schell:
In short, we already see games creeping into our everyday lives in all kinds of funny ways. You go to Starbucks, and you get points if you have a Starbucks card. And, in fact, they have a whole leveling system. The more times you visit, the more you move from level green up to gold level, with special privileges and free soy milk.
Already, we have this whole system of economies floating around out there. And at the same time, we have all these technologies showing up that are allowing us to track new things, things that we couldn’t do before. […]
I think camera-based technology and tracking is going to be one of the things, in the next 10 years, we’re going to see a lot of evolution in.
The idea of cheap little cameras and disposable cameras are going to become fairly normal. And when you combine that with the fact that we’re getting used to touch-based interfaces and gesture-based interfaces, I think we’re going to see these cameras in a lot of places for interacting with a lot of things.
You’ve got Google Goggles, where you take a picture of like anything, and it will tell you what it is. We haven’t really started to make games with that yet, but I think we will start to.
And if you look at the new Nintendo DSi, which is their newest handheld, it has two cameras on it, which at first seemed kind of crazy to people, but the idea is you have one camera that faces out into the world and one that faces you the user, so it can look at your face and study your face.
No one’s quite figured out exactly what that’s for yet.
April 6, 2010 at 4:55 am
“Life today is an ugly and barbarous existence that is the result of taking order seriously and so seriously fearing contrary orders and disorder. In which games are taken as more important than life; rather than taking life as the Art of Playing Games.”