A friend of mine pointed out Jesse Schell’s presentation at DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) Summit that was held in February in Vegas. Schell’s a Professor of Technology at Carnegie Mellon, who also worked as a Disney imagineer and game designer. His talk has been making the rounds around the Internet and blogosphere, so I thought I’d share my take on it.

Schell starts off by discussing the recent success stories in social networking (e.g. Farmville, Mafia Wars) and interactive media (e.g. Xbox achievements), and argues that people are shifting towards more “authentic” experiences than fantasy-based experiences; in other words, that people are not trying to escape from reality, but re-engage with it, often with the help of technology. He offers a reading of the movie Avatar as an allegory of people wanting to use technology to experience the beauty of nature (while failing to note that only the scientists in the movie were interested in that; everyone else was trying to destroy or exploit Pandora). He also envisions a future where people will be surrounded by point rewards systems, much like Xbox achievements or frequent flier miles, and that these points would be ubiquitouse because media will be embedded in everything, from our bodies to cereal boxes.

A few of my own thoughts:

1) Schell doesn’t really say whether this is a good vision of the future. Throughout most of his talk, he seems to describe his prediction as a likely trajectory, but I’m guessing that he approves of this future because he talks about possible benefits. One of them would be that people will change their behavior because every part of it would be recorded for posterity. I’m not sure if that will necessarily make a difference, though. I am personally fascinated by my grandparents’ personal history, but less so about what they ate or drank on any given day. This is something that might sound cool on paper but not so much practice. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor, who told me how cool it was that you can browse the Internet through Second Life, and I was thinking “Yes, that is cool, but I can also browse it through a regular browser and it’s a lot faster.”

2) Schell assumes that people will be motivated by points alone, which seems awfully Skinnerian to me. (The fact that he seems to talk about it with awe is a bit disconcerting). In some cases, he suggests that these points will be tied to tax benefits or scholarships, and I can see that possibly being a good thing. In addition, if the recent panic about trophies in the PlayStation Network 8001050F Crash, people do seem to care a lot about their game achievements. (I personally couldn’t care less, but I might be in the minority). At the same time, if everyone starts offering points, I wonder whether this wouldn’t cancel out the effects of the reward system and put people back where they were before.

3) Schell describes Professor Lee Sheldon’s game-like point system for his courses game-like point system for his courses, which is admittedly pretty cool and something I would love to try in some form. Edward Castronova has also blogged about this at Terra Nova.

4) Schell’s frame of reference seems to be awfully short. His analysis that activities are becoming more “game-like” overlooks that play and games has been embedded in human culture for as long as there has been human culture (ala Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens). On that same note, the dangers of having a short frame of reference means that you overestimate the impact of some trends, which may or may not have staying power. Basing a prediction on fad is really not a good idea. (See also Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan).

5) Schell predicts that media will diverge instead of converge. He doesn’t elaborate much beyond that (other than calling it BS), but again, I think that might oversimplify things a bit. It might be true that divergence will occur in the form of hardware, with each media company trying to copyright or patent their content in a way that cannot easily be shared, but there continues to be a market demand for convergence, which means that people will find ways to get their media in one source (e.g. the computer). Pew Research on Internet and American Life already notes that more people are getting their news and television shows on the computer.

6) Schell was surprised at Nintendo Wii’s success. Really? I’m not a Wii fanboy by any stretch but I think it was pretty clear that Nintendo had something cool going on when they first unleashed their control system to the public.

7) Confirmation bias galore. For every success story like Farmville and Mafia Wars, how many failed products did he overlook?

8) He predicts that people will happily become walking billboards and marketing tools, which I find hard to believe. Unless corporations pay people to advertise their products on their bodies, otherwise why would people run towards advertisements? In the age of digital recorders like TiVo or other devices that let you skip ads, why will people suddenly want to run towards them just for points? After spending years watching TV on the Internet, I can’t get used to watching TV in hotels anymore ‘cause the ads are just so ludicrous and invasion. If nothing else, I think people want more control over their media, including what ads they want to watch (Hulu already does this to some extent), and not the other way round.

9) Schell argues that people are more into “authentic” experience today, like getting “real, organic food” or “real” whatever you can think of. While I agree with that trend, I’m not sure I think it’s due to a change in consciousness, but a change in technology, which, for example, extends (often artificially and dangerously) produce to withstand longer life, refrigeration, transportation, and so on. HIs point is a bit Baudrillardian in that he almost suggests that people are expecting the real thing to be more real than reality (I don’t think he actually says that point blank, so this is just my interpretation of his talk). If you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, you know that that has a ring of truth; corporations insert and exaggerate certain tastes to make them more noticeable to consumers. It’s a bit disturbing that Schell doesn’t comment on whether these experiences are genuinely authentic, or whether it’s just a marketing ploy.

Having noted all these criticisms, I do think his talk is engaging. He’s a whimsical speaker who definitely makes some good points. I would love to hear what anyone else thinks of his presentation.