This is a bit old, I got sent the link a few weeks ago but only just got around to watching it now. Its about 25 minutes long, but its a really interesting presentation on technology and the explosion of stuff like facebook games and some ideas behind why stuff like that has been so phenomenally successful. Then it finishes off with a bit of a tongue in cheek look at where we're heading. Well worth the watch :)

Christ it is taking ages to load...

http://www.necomonline.co.uk/images/heavy.jpg

^ he'll lead

not bad.
certainly makes you think about all the ways you're getting f***ed without even realising. literally consumer rape.

Very interesting!

That was damn cool. I know I sometimes get sucked in to the whole achievement thing.

Points have been a corporate culture ways of saying 'we're sorry for putting you on the debt train' if you like for a long time. Developers applying those points to games is parallel to the tangible goods and services on offer in things like credit/store card gift catalogs or frequent flyer miles, but as a way of intensifying the emotional attachment to gaming and bringing the experience in line with those tangible goods and services systems. They work on the paradigm of free now, buy in if you want more, which is the same way the more hardcore gaming audience works with systems like Steam: except the hardware cost to play those games is usually a much greater than someone playing Farmville on a netbook or average plonk PC would be.

I like how he attempts to put simple equations to maths at play in the games, and you can easily see it would be a lot more complex than a > d if he figured that chaos out. Hilarious how towards the end he plays high pitch audio clips along with points adding up for various actions and suggests the application of gaming to real life as a kind of augmented reality. Funny guy.