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Jesse Schell, CEO and Creative Director of Schell Games, imagines a future where every aspect of our daily lives are integrated with video games.
Jesse Schell, CEO and Creative Director of Schell Games, applies Gartner's hype cycle to consumer reaction to the iPad, from inflated expectations, to disillusionment, all the way to the device finding its niche as a couch companion.
Jesse Schell, CEO and Creative Director of Schell Games, describes the current relationship between advertisers and the video game industry, and predicts the future of what he calls "advergaming." "The virtual economies in these games are powerful," he says.
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ALEXANDER ROSE:I'm Alexander Rose; I'm the Director of the Long Now Foundation. As some of you know who come to these talks every month we do a little short film before each talk which we call a "long short". This is a shortterm film that exemplifies longterm thinking. Our long short this month is called "Pixel". Alright enjoy. STEWART BRAND:I'm Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Product Placement, it's a good book. Back in 1972 I wrote an article for Rolling Stone called Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bones and what I was writing about was space war and hackers forty years ago. I was actually referring to something that started in 1961 at MIT and quickly generated this thing called "space war" which was the only computer that we called video games for like ten years. It clearly was leaking out of the many computers it was on and affecting the lives of everybody who played it. And since that time these games have been leaking further and further out of the machines into the real world. In this series we had Daniel Suarez last year talking about his book Demon which was a great thriller about exactly that theme. That was fiction, tonight we get nonfiction. Jesse Schell. JESSE SCHELL:Hi. Wow, look at all these people. Hey can we get some rhythmic clapping. Okay that's good just keep it going just not so fast. Thank you that's not relevant at all but I'm a very nervous speaker and that helped calm me down a great deal. So thank you, thank you very much for that. Okay so tonight my talk is called "Visions of the Gamepocalypse", and in a way it's kind of a follow up talk. How many people saw my dice talk on the Internet? Oh my gosh that's a lot of people which is weird because I'm a college professor and I'm not used to people listening to me. Then suddenly like a million views on that video so that was kind of unexpected for me. Just for people who don't know who I am, just a quick background, I'm the CEO of a video game studio called Schell Games. We have about 50 people and we operate out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and we have a second studio in Austin. I also teach at Carnegie Mellon University at the Entertainment Technology Center there. I formerly was with Walt Disney Imagineering designing interactive theme park rides and I continue to work with Disney quite a bit. And, as Stewart was saying, I wrote a book called The Art of Game Design and there's a kind of deck of creativity cards that goes with it. And I'm very excited to announce just yesterday we launched a digital version of the cards on the Droid if anyone has the Droid. We'll get it out on the iPod as soon as the Apple beaurocracy will finish chewing on it. Anyway, this other talk I gave back in February of in short, I'm going to give you the shortened version of it, it was all about the fact that there's this huge driver and cultural force right now of authenticity that people want things that are more real and more connected with reality. And this has really kind of gone into the game space quite a bit. Real life and games have been kind of reaching out to each other and connecting in ways that we previously hadn't seen. And we've seen all kinds of examples of it in games. We have all these Facebook games which are all about your real life, playing with friends in real life. We have the Wii and the Wii Fit which are all about using your body and Guitar Hero using real music from the real world making kind of real motions with the guitar and video games involving real stuffed animals. The games kind of leaning towards reality at the same time reality is kind of reaching back with all these different ways people giving you points and things out in the world. So in this talk I've kind of fast-forward and said "where is this going, what could the future possibly look like?' I describe something that I refer to as the "Gamepocalypse." The idea of the gamepocalypse is that is when every second of your life you're actually playing a game in some way. And so I'm going to repeat the final part of that talk because it gives some sense of it. So if you can imagine where this all might be going, imagine that sometime in the near future that you wake up in the morning and you go to brush your teeth and your toothbrush has inexpensive sensors on it and its WiFi connected because it's really cheap to do that and so you go to brush your teeth and it's like good job, here's some points for brushing your teeth. Of course, once you brush your teeth a full three minutes you know more bonus points because that's the appropriate amount of time to brush your teeth. Hey you brushed your teeth every day this week twice a day, more bonus points for you. And you can use these bonus points on discounts on toothpaste and things youre going to buy anyway at the grocery store. And this sounds stupid. Who would do this? Why? Well, the toothbrush people know the more you brush your teeth the faster you use the toothpaste, the faster you use toothbrushes, the more of them you're going to buy, theyre going to want to incentivize you to do it. So then you go to breakfast and there are the Corn Flakes, in the old days you used to read the back of the box, but not anymore. There's a screen on the back of the box and again its WiFi connected and everything and it's got a tilt sensor because everybody likes tilt sensors so it can tell when you tip the box. So there's 10 points for eating Corn Flakes. And then you're playing the Corn Flakes game on the back while you eat and you get points for doing that. Then you can see a list and it's connected to Facebook of course and you can see all your friends who are also eating Corn Flakes and playing the Corn Flakes game and hey you just got a score higher than all your friends. Okay bonus points because you're doing best at that. Then you go to work and you're going to get on the bus and you're like "The bus? Why would I take the bus?" Well, you take the bus because the government gives out bonus points for people who take public transit. So you're like hey, good job, and you're sitting there on the bus and you take out your little phone and you were going to play Tetris but instead you end up playing Coketris because it's free. You know we went from $5.99 apps to .99 apps and now all the apps are sponsored so they're all free. So you're playing Coketris. And that reminds you, "oh I had this dream last night. I had a dream that my mother was dancing with a giant Pepsi can, that's kind of weird." And then you realize, oh duh, I'm using the REMtertainment system and the REMtertainment system you put in your ear before you go to sleep at night and it can sense when you've entered REM sleep and it starts whispering little messages in your ear attempting to influence your dreams with product placement messages. Then you take tests in the morning and if you can guess what product was put in your dreams, then that means its working and so they give you all kinds of points. And, of course, the more you do it the more successful it works because we train our dreams. So you get big points because you remembered that it was a Pepsi ad in your dream last night. So then you get to work on time, good job. And, in fact, you've been on time every day this week so you know excellent job. You go to your cube and there's your office mate and he's like "check it out, check it out, I got this new tattoo using Eink. I got one of the Eink tattoos and lets me change the tattoo to whatever I want". And, of course, right now he's got it hooked up to "Tattoogoogle Ad Sense," so he gets points and he gets money for putting ads on there. And you're telling him that's really dumb because everyone knows Tattoogoogle Ad Sense has light sensors built in and if you have your sleeve covering it up you're not going to get any points for that. And you show him yours which is lower on the arm so it gets more light and just then you realize that your tattoos are matching right now. So you say "link sync, and that's points and then he says "pop tarts," because they're ads for pop tarts and you get points for that. And then you do high five and the body electricity sensors can sense that we did a high five and boom we both get points for that. We both think that's pretty great that we notice the link sync. And you're like what is that stupid thing, but that's what's going to happen is we're going to have these games designed to make you notice advertisements. They'll be fun but they make you notice ads so it's going to be very important. So it's time to go to lunch and all week you've been having Dr. Peppers. So that's 10 points, 10 points, 10 points, 10 points for Dr. Peppers. But you know there's a special with Dr. Peppers this week. So if you have a fifth Dr. Pepper you get "boom" big bonus points so, of course, you're going to have one at lunch. But then after lunch you go to a meeting and the meeting is in another building and, of course, you took the bus today. You could take the shuttle over but you say "you know what. I'm going to walk because I've got digital shoes and my health insurance provider gives me discounts on my health insurance if I walk more than a mile a day." So, of course, you're going to do that. And if you get your heart rate above a certain level, bonus points for that so you do brisk walking over to your other meeting. Then it's time you're going home and you're going to do some shopping, this is going to be a points festival. Oh my God, it's so complicated you can't figure it out so you go to your app and you go "hey app these are the things I want," and it's like okay here's the ones you should buy. And, of course, it knows just where they are in the grocery store and so "boom" you get a whole bunch of points for the shopping that your app told you to do. So you go home and your daughters like "hey guess what I got my report card,' and you're like "whoa. Look at those grades they're really good." So you're going to get all of these points from the state for getting good grades. It's going to apply toward your scholarship and as a parent I'm going to get the Barak Obama good parenting bonus which I can apply for tax relief which is really useful. So you're like wait a second did you practice your piano today? And she says, "Well, yeah I practiced my piano". "Well, what score did you get?" She said, "oh well, I got 85,000." You're like 85,000 that's the best you've ever done on that sonata, that's a new high score for you so "boom" points for you from the Arts Council that apply towards a scholarship for you, so that's very nice. Okay so that's done. It's the end of the day so we're going to watch some TV. And TV that is just a crazy, crazy points vessel, points, and points and points and points, because there's a camera on the TV now that came in with that Microsoft connect thing, you mounted a camera on top of the TV and it's watching you all the time. People realize you can use this for all kinds of things. We can use it for eye tracking and can tell when you're actually looking at the ads. So there's all these games about watching the ads, like follow the red ball, follow the logo. So it used to be people were skipping the ads but those days are past now everybody wants to watch the ads because of points, points, points. And, of course, your remote has a screen on it. And, of course, its Facebook connected so you can chat with your friends who are playing the same games and you can see which friends are watching which shows and have a conversation and you play games together and points, and points, and points. So TV can be a very natural place to be full of points. Then finally okay fine it's time to go to bed. You know you've got your Kindle 4.0 or whatever it is and the cool thing about the Kindle 4.0 is it has, just like your TV, it has an eye tracker on it which is nice because when you get stuck and you're like "what is this weird word, what does this mean," it can sense automatically that you're having trouble reading the word and it pops up a definition. That's really nice but also they can tell what you've read and Amazon wants to know that because if you're going to review a book, you're going to get a heck of a lot more points if you've read every word of the book as opposed to if you just gave it a skim and they'll know because they want that information. You finish reading your book and what do you know achievement unlocked, but did I mention that Microsoft bought Amazon; I mean that's probably going to happen anyway. So achievement unlocked. You've read 500 novels. This systems been tracking you for like 20 years, you've unlocked 500 novels and you're like "yes 500 novels, that's an awesome achievement." But then you start to feel a little stupid, you start to realize, man my 500 novels was dumb Star Trek novels. It's bad enough that I know that but that's memorialized because once we have all these sensors and everything on us watching us all the time everything that we do all the time, we're going to remember it. Remember when you used to delete email? Now we keep it all. We're going to keep all this data. You don't know day to day what your grandparents read. What books did they read? Where they go every day? But your grandchildren they're going to know. They're going to know everything you read, everything you did every day, every place you went because of all the sensors are there and recording it. You start thinking maybe I'd better step up my reading a little because you know this is going to be my legacy. So it may be that this future with all these disposable sensors maybe this is a gross commercialization mess that you don't want any part of. But on the other hand maybe it will urge us to kind of be better than we were. Anyway, that was the kind of ending of that dice talk that I gave that got people thinking quite a bit. And a lot of people had different reactions to this. Some people were excited they thought this was really cool. Other people thought, no this is not cool, this is [INAUDIBLE] and I would have to say no it's not really, technically its huxleyan. You know 1984 was all about the government using technology to control people. That's not what this is. This is more like brave new world where technology controls us because it is so pleasurable and that's a bit of a different situation. But still I understand that people think it's creepy. Other people said this is happening now, when I talked about this toothbrush thing and immediately after the talk someone said I have an OralB toothbrush that already does this. It times you, it's got a three minute thing and then it's a sad face if you don't finish your three minutes and you hit your three minutes and "ding" happy face. Is it WiFi? They're like, "no it's not but I have a WiFi scale," the guy says. So there's a scale out there that's WiFi, so every time you weigh yourself "boom" to a database so you have a perpetual graph of your weight effortlessly. You can even configure it to tweet your weight if you would want that. I don't know who would want that. I figure it would be about five minutes before we get a WiFi toothbrush. That will be coming very soon. Then all these other things started coming up. You've got the shift to help replay watch. It's a regular watch, more or less, its kind of funky looking, but its got motion sensor. After it senses an hour of motion from like running or exercising or something, it spits out a code and you type in the code online and you get coupons for Starbucks or Barnes and Noble or things like that. You've got things like Green Goose which tracks how much you ride your bike and they're working on doing things like, how much are you drinking water as opposed to drinking soda? You put a tilt sensor on the bottle and it automatically uploads that to the Internet. They have all kinds of things like that. Tropicana Juicy Rewards, I don't know if people have seen this. Codes on your orange juice, you type them in online and you get points and prizes for drinking orange juice. Mindbloom is a real interesting one. It's meant to be kind of like a virtual plant that represents your good habits. So you tell it, "oh I would like to take vitamins every day and I think I should exercise." And then you spend virtual money to make these commitments and then when you meet the commitment you get paid back in your little tree. It like grows. My tree's all sad and dead. Anyway, then there's EpicWin, if you want to check out EpicWinApp.com, or just check out the EpicWin app I think its on the iPhone, and I think its coming to the Droid. It basically takes your to do list and turns it into a role playing game. So you get experience points and you level up every time you complete these things and it turns into this big adventure. There's so many. NBC started this Fan It thing, it's like hey, do you like our shows? Earn points, if you watch a trailer for a show we'll give you points for that. You tweet about a show and they'll give you points for that. And you can use these points to cash them in and buy T shirts for NBC. Advertise for yourself and we'll give you free advertisement so you can advertise to other people. Then freaking Honey Nut Cheerios came up with an augmented reality application. You hold the box up in front of your web cam and you use it to steer through this virtual environment. So cereal boxes are like part of the gamepocalypse ahead of schedule. I did not expect that or see that coming. One question is: What the hell? I mean, so here we have games creeping into reality, reality is creeping into games. All of life starts to become a game. One question would be: Why? Why would this happen? Why in the world would this happen? Well, the fundamental reason is games are awesome. Games are really cool. They're fun and they're interesting and we love games. So we want things to be awesome so, of course, games are going to come through and creep into things. But, let's be more specific about this. People talk about "oh things are becoming game like," let's break down some of the things we like about games. There's a lot to like in games. Games have a lot of cool stuff. Some of the things games provide. They provide clear feedback. When you're at work, it's like how am I doing at work? It's hard to know. What does my boss think? And you get these vague senses. In a game it's like did you beat level 3? No, I totally beat level 3. It's not ambiguous. Boss monster is dead and now I'm on level 4 and now I've got a badge. Look it's very, very clear the feedback you get. You get this sense of progress about getting better and better and better and it's very clear and you love it. We love those little progress bars. Love them. It's really hard not to fill in that progress bar, even though you don't want to. No Farmville I don't want to post, oh I get a 100% on my progress bar? Yes. Yes, I finished the progress bar. Okay. Games give you the possibility of success. We attempt a lot of things in life. Is it going to work? Is it even possible? I don't know. But in games, if there's a game, yeah it can be won. Yeah almost always, you know that. Games give you mental exercise. They give you physical exercise. We like that. Those are an important part of games. Games let you satisfy your curiosity. That's a big part of games. It's one of the things that you come in and you're like hmm can I solve this? How am I going to do it? And then you get to do that which is pleasing. Then you get a chance to solve a problem, and we like solving problems. We find it very rewarding, particularly when they're problems that we know are potentially solvable, not just weird head cracking problems. And they're problems that when they're solved, it's very clear that you have solved the problem and it is 100% fully solved. We like that a lot. And games give you a feeling of freedom. And this is maybe one of the most defining things about games. That's how they're not work. Work you have to do. If there's a game and I make you play it, it's not fun anymore. It doesn't feel like a game. It's a game but you enter into games willfully. You do it because you want to. This has been very thought provoking for me because so much of what we're getting into is about this. There's an excellent book, it's actually a book from the 80s, Finite and Infinite Games. It's actually a philosophy book; the sub title is "A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility." It talks about how there are two ways to approach everything. One is as a finite game, a thing that can be won or lost. And another is as an infinite game, a thing that you enter into with a sense of curiosity and a sense of playfulness. This is a very interesting philosophical approach. Partly I find it fascinating because it presumes that all of life is just a series of games and then secondly it goes right toe to toe with the sense of what exactly is freedom and how is it related to us. Anyway, you might want to check that out. One of the things that you have to do if you're going to think about this seriously, I mean, you're trying to predict the future. And a lot of people have given up on predicting the future. This audience is certainly very familiar with the concept of the singularity and I often find that people mean very different things when they talk about this singularity. Some people talk about it as some artificial intelligence moment or some computing moment. I don't think that's what's important. The nature of the singularity, the singularity in my mind is very much the moment when technology has advanced so far that we are unable to predict what the world will be like five seconds from now. A thousand years ago you could make a pretty good prediction about what things would be like one year later or five years later or even ten or twenty years later. For us to predict 20 years in the future, now whoa, that seems really hard. Even two years. And the numbers are creeping in and eventually the ideas of singularity is that it will be five seconds and you wouldn't even be able to guess what's going on. With this happening, because of this threshold, the prediction threshold is creeping in, it's made a lot of people give up on prediction. They've become future blind. They're like "I can't even think about it, something's going to happen, I don't know, I'll put my money here." That's ridiculous because if you put some energy into it you can make some predictions about the future. You can look into your crystal ball and you can figure it out. But it takes practice and the ironic part is if you practice it the singularity is actually helping you because for you to predict, "Okay, what's going to be up with mobile applications two years in the future?" And really put your mind on it and focus, well guess what, in two years you're going to have some good feedback about right or wrong and then you can use that and say oh I did a bad job in predicting this, maybe I'll do better. If you practice predicting you will get better and you're going to get feedback fast. But if you're future blind and you don't bother, you're going to continue to suck at predicting the future. So with that in mind here are some of my attempts to kind of predict some of the things that are coming down the road as we move toward the Gamepocalypse. Some of them will be right and some of them will be wrong but hopefully they will be meaningfully thought provoking. So there's us and there's the Gamepocalypse up there and we're going to get there. Do we want to get there? Well, maybe you do and maybe you don't but it's coming so you might as well figure it out. Is it a straight line? No. It's kind of a winding path to get there. And there are a lot of things on the way. There are different things on the way. So some of the things we're going to see, we're going to see a lot of different sort of cultural forces that are at work. We're going to see a heck of a lot of technologies on the way that are going to make a difference for us and we're going to see some implications towards the nature of design that comes out of all of this. So when you add it all up, oh my God there's a lot of stuff on this winding path and that's fine we can deal with a lot of stuff so here we go. We'll go on our path and we'll start with the idea of nooks and crannies. And this has become very important for games. So as games are creeping everywhere, people always say "oh where are games going?" I say they are going everywhere and there are a lot of forces at work doing this. Some of them are technological, some are cultural and some of them are financial but there are pressures for games to go everywhere. So if you're going to make games you need to look in the places they haven't gone yet. And so there are all these weird nooks and crannies that we can look in to figure out where games are going to go. One of them is: Who is playing games? It used to be okay its males 1525. That's our target demographic. One of the things that have happened recently is no everyone is playing games. Male, female, young, old, there are games for everybody. But what nooks and crannies can you go into that you haven't gone into yet? Have you figured out how to make a game for fishermen? Have you figured out how to make a game for pogo stick enthusiasts? I mean, there are all these nooks and crannies of the human race that you can go to. Some of them are geographical. There are a lot of games for Americans. Games in Asia are a little different. Not too many people are making games for Africa because they don't have so much money there. But like who's making games for the Middle East? I'll tell you what; those guys have a lot of freaking money. I bet they'd love it if someone would make them some great games, but it's not happening. But someone's going to. So there are nooks and crannies that way. But one of the most important nooks and crannies is when you look at how you spend your day. This is going to be the battlefield of the 21st century as the world tries to compete for your attention in everything that you do. Already you know leisure time, that's well understood in terms of where games are, but the big explosion of Facebook gaming, that's because you can play Facebook games at work and no one will know. Suddenly "boom" there's this huge chunk of time you can spend playing games that you weren't before. Look at the size of that compared to socializing. And then there are all these other things. Can I have games that are part of TV? Oh my God, that's going to be huge for games. Household activities, the Swiffer is almost a game. Can I get points for doing the Swiffer? Grooming. I talked about toothbrushes. Can my hair do that? REM sleep. We talked about that. And well anyway, this is like one way to think about carving things up. Oh can I have a game, I already play games with my dog where I throw him a stick and he brings it back, can there be points and stuff? Is there a digital version? You get a million points because you're so cute. Okay, moving on. This nook and cranny principal, we're going to see this coming up a lot. And one thing related to this is the idea of micro transactions. It used to be with games you plunked down your money, you get a big fat game and that was how it worked. Now we have the ability to spend fifty cents here or a dollar there and it's changed the way games work because you can start playing for free and then in the game when you want something, because we want things in the middle of a game, they can say oh that thing is fifty cents and that changes what we can do. It lets us put games in places they weren't before. People sometimes ask, "Well, wait a minute. Do people really want these micro transactions? I'm not sure I really believe in this." And I'm like are you a freaking idiot? Have you seen the app store? People are happy to spend 99 cents on some dumb thing. In huge millions and millions of dollars and we've seen this have a huge impact on the game industry. Look at this chart of handheld revenue. In 2008 it was Nintendo DS was a clear winner. PSP doing okay. IPhone, you've got a little bit of game software. By 2009 PSP has like fallen in half, iPhone has taken this huge chunk and then Nintendo is still hanging in there but they're like hey wait a minute how can we get some of that action? What about all the game consoles? Why don't we see this on the game consoles? And the reason is these guys are freaking scared to death of micro transactions. They're like no, no, no, we want our 50 bucks. You spend 50 bucks on a game. You don't spend a quarter. I don't want that. None of them wants to be the one that really opens the door for like free games and then suddenly games got really cheap but somebody's going to do it. I bet it's going to be some fourth console that comes in and does that and these guys are all going to feel like they have to catch up. We'll find out. And here's one other thing, if you take social networking and you combine that with micro transactions, oh my God, that's like peanut butter and chocolate. Because you're playing for free and you and your friends are hanging out and then suddenly social pressure to spend 50 cents. Well, all right. But social pressure is so much stronger than other kinds of pressure and it works really, really well with micro transactions. Now, an interesting thing to note. The companies that are succeeding with micro transactions, these are not the companies that succeeded traditionally in the game space. None of the big game companies are really succeeding here. It's these new guys, Zynga and Playfish and Playtem. Did you hear that Disney bought Playtem for $500 million dollars today? Crazy! And then you've got Big Point in Europe, oh my goodness. This was an example I had cited before. This really shook up the game industry, a little formula EA minus 1500 full time staff plus Playfish minus $300,000,000, which is what they bought it for, equals, you know, what in the world is going on? Clearly the game industry is changing and turning upside down. These two things happened in the same day. You 1500 people you're laid off. Okay Playfish come on in. Here's your $300,000,000. Everybody is like what? Even if you divide that it doesn't Alright, moving on. Now, this all relates to, I know many people are familiar with this book in this audience, Clay Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, it so much describes the situation. This book is all about why big companies never see it coming, which is crazy. You would think big companies, they're smart, that's how they got big, and of course they're going to see the future coming. No, they don't. Little guys grow up. And the reason is this difficult to comprehend graph. This graph is like product performance, how awesome your product is and this is over time. Oh, let me get the good laser. This laser stinks. Oh look my laser got better over time. Okay good. So all products get better over time, we know that they're going to get better because you're going to keep advancing. Well, that's fine, that's great. Here's a product getting better slowly and here's a product getting better fast. Well, they point out these important lines. And these are two important lines. This one at the top is all about I don't need anything better than this. There's a certain amount of gigahertz where you're like, no seriously my web surfing is fine, a hundred million gigahertz is not, no seriously I'm just watching videos and stuff man, I'll keep my old one. And there's that line. And then the other line is this important one down here. This is the line, if it's below this; you're like no that things garbage, I can't use it. But then the second it's above it you're like that's good enough that's fine I can use that. And what happens to the big companies is they get something that's up here people like it, they're using it. And they say customers, what shall we do? The customers are like make it better. Okay, we'll make it better. Make it better. All right we'll make it better. Hey customers I'm going to take a pause at this moment and ask you what do you think of this alternate technology. They say "boo, sucks, not good enough for me. Take yours and make it better." All right. I'm making it better. What do you think of it now? They're like, "I don't really need it to be this good. You'll have to excuse me because I need to go buy this because it's like way cheaper and it does everything I need." I'm like I just asked you about that. And they're like yeah but that was before it was quite good enough right. And this is what happens every, every, every time. If you're predicting the future, this is a very useful tool for you. All right. Moving on. Next step, new sensors. Oh my gosh, this is how games are going to get everywhere because we're going to sense things. Games have to sense things because otherwise how do they know what's going on? And every time some new sensor shows up, there's a new way to make a game about it. There are so many kinds of sensors coming. It was so exciting when people had the iPhone. Oh it's tilting and a million games came out about tilting and suddenly tilting was fun. Oh I can touch it and that's fun. Every time a new sensor shows up you can do something. Like we've seen the Wii Fit and you're like wow you can do these kinds of exercise things and that's cool. And, of course, the Wii was a big revolution. And now we're going to have the Microsoft Connect which has a camera up there, you can use your whole body as a controller. And that's coming out this Christmas and that's cool. Then you've got the Playstation Move which is a similar sort of thing where it can sense motion except its more detailed. So everybody is doing these things which are all about this full sensing. And we're still figuring out how you're going to use it, but it's a good thing to pause and think for a second because everyone just assumes, oh I'll be able to do it with my whole body therefore that's more realistic so its better. That's why it's better; right? Because you're moving your whole body, it's more realistic. And if you ask Nintendo they say no, no, no, that's not why. Nintendo talks about the problem of too many buttons. Nintendo's goal in creating the Wii mote was not because motion was cool. Nintendo once said their problem as they looked at was that not enough people were playing games. And they went to people who didn't play games and they said you used to play games, how come you stopped? People would say, well the controller it used to be simple, it had a couple of buttons then it got complicated. They got all these buttons. There's way too many buttons. I can't deal with so many buttons. They would say. And Nintendo said well maybe that is the problem too many buttons. But they thought about it and they said wait a minute, you say its too many buttons but you've got one of these. It's got way more buttons and in fact I've been to your house, you've got three of them on the couch. That's a lot of freaking buttons, that's way more buttons than we've got on this thing. And they realized it's not the number of buttons. It's something Nintendo calls simultaneous ambidextrous control. In other words, having to use both hands at once to do different things is what these modern controllers demand of the player. That is cognitively difficult for people. And it's not a function of number of buttons. And you notice these remotes; none of them demand you to use two hands at once for two different things. They don't ask that. And so Nintendo said well, if we made a game controller that was one handed, how could we do it because you need to do a lot of things? They said oh what if we used; we've been fooling around with motion control, what if we used motion control so we didn't need so many buttons? And that was why they made the Wii mote. Because that's how it feels to a player who's not used to it. So they made the Wii mote which is it's just so simple. It even has fewer buttons in there and so that's very nice. Anyway, so sensors are going everywhere and they're going to get we're going to be able to sense all kinds of things, you've got Nike plus has sensors in your shoes. We're going to be able to sense temperature. We've got Foursquare sensing where you are out in the world. Sensors, sensors, sensors. We're going to see more of them and they're going to be cheap and they're going to be disposable and they're going to be on everything. That's going to let us play all kinds of games. Someone after the talk said, oh yeah I wanted to tell you about I work for this company and we make pills that have sensors in them, they're powered by your gastric juices and it can sense like temperature in your body and it sends out a little radio signal to a little Band-Aid that you've put on and the Band-Aid receives a temperature information over time in your body. And I'm like why are you talking to me? Why are you telling me? Well, we're thinking of making a game out of it. Oh great, that sounds like a great game. Some people say, oh they joke about implants and we might get implants one day but implants are a pain, so if implants are coming, meaningful implants, I think they're going to start in the tooth because teeth are cool, they're like bones outside your skin. Anyway, that's just a note about teeth and implants. Okay moving on. So there are a lot of new sensors. But you've got to have more than sensors. You need screens. We're going to have all of these new screens that are going to show up. We are already seeing screens show up in our lives. First we saw, hey screens in your pocket, now everyone carries a little screen around. They all have a screen all the time. And people are like good, I don't need any more screens. But no, of course not. You're going to have more and more and more screens, because screens are getting cheaper and we like because technology always diverges and so we're going to have more and more screens. Siftio are you in the audience? Where is Siftio? Whoa Siftio. So Siftio these guys are like making these little cubes that have screens on them that can sense the presence of each other and so you can do interactive games and activities on the table top. It's kind of like a cross between board game and video game and app. And it's a new way of kind of interacting and it all has to do with having multiple screens that you can move around and place relative to each other. So we're going to have this kind of coffee table board game space is going to start to have a lot of screens in it. I made a joke back in February and it was real funny in February right after the iPad came out I was talking about technologies and how they diverge and I was saying how the iPhone, like technologies always diverge but the iPhone is weird because it has a convergence of technologies, kind of like a Swiss army knife does. This is only possible because the only place technologies don't diverge is in your pocket. It's the pocket exception to the law of divergence. And so yeah sure a Swiss army knife, it makes total sense in your pocket. But if I gave you one for your kitchen you would say that's really stupid because it can only do one thing at a time and it's difficult to clean. You say this is awkward and ridiculous and that's why everyone hates the iPad. Now, at the time that got a roaring laugh, back in February, but then a couple of months later I told the same joke and people were kind of like no I kind of like the iPad. So iPad is actually kind of cool. And the reason for this if for the hype curve, from the gardener group, for people who know about this, all technologies follow the same curve. They start with a basic technology trigger at the bottom and like this cool thing this guy invented. Now, this is a graph of visibility over time. This thing got invented and then everybody starts talking about it, no one has seen it yet. Everyone's talking about it. Oh, it's awesome. They're talking about it so amazing I can't wait it's going to change my life and they're waiting outside the store in order to buy the thing. This is the point called the peak of inflated expectations. And then the thing comes out and everyone sees it for what it really is and they all say boo we hate it and we go deep into the trough of disillusionment. Boo this thing's horrible. We hate it and it sucks, but then eventually people figure out oh I see what this is for and then over time they figure out okay it doesn't change everything but its good for some things and that's really nice. So at the time like I told that joke it was like right here. People were like oh man I thought the iPad was going to change everything. But then later people were like actually I can do web surfing on the couch. It's kind of nice I kind of figured it out. On Saturday Night Live they had it right when the iPad came out they made a great joke about it they said. They said the iPad came out this weekend, 300,000 people bought it, $500 they each paid for this which brings in the new era of people buying things to find out what they are, which is totally true. Because you see people with the iPad and they're like: Should I bring it to work? I guess? Maybe? I don't know what's it for? And they gradually figure it out. And it turns out what the iPad is freaking awesome for is like computing on the couch. Computing on the couch always sucked before, trying to do your laptop kind of sucked. Or you use the phone but it's so small. This actually kind of nice for the couch it's great. It fills the little nook and cranny in my life that I didn't know I needed. It's like oh this is pretty great. I don't know if I want to carry it everywhere all the time. I feel weird at a meeting typing on that thing but on the couch that's pretty great. So what have we learned from this? Put jokes here. We learned that certainly. But I think the deeper thing is that to figure out the nooks and crannies that the plateau of productivity is all about we have to figure out where these go. I love this. This was announced about two days ago. A company in India has announced they're going to make a tablet computer, $35. It's coming out in 2012, I think they've announced. Thirtyfive bucks. And my favorite part about it is this picture of the guy. Hey check it out 35 bucks, you can buy an iPad or you can buy 15 of these. Anyway, it seems sort of silly but it certainly points to the fact that screens are going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and you're going to be able to put them in all kinds of weird places that you didn't think of before. Oh and as a side note on this. The person who figures out how to combine digital pornography with a waterproof shampoo bottle is going to be very rich. That person will make a lot of money. Remember this day for I dub it shamporn. Okay. All right moving on, let's move out of that definitely. So let's move to the next stop, next horrifying stop. There are fantasy experiences we have that don't involve screens at all. And so for example our dreams. It's really interesting to think about dreams, because dreams are like I mean you can't get any more immersive than that. I like to think about who writes those, they're good, I'd like to meet that guy because it's awesome some of those things are exciting and terrifying and you know perplexing. I think like what did he mean by that, I don't know. Which gets to the question of: Can we control them? And, of course, there are people who have worked hard at like, you know there are the ideas of lucid dreams, dreams where you have sort of freedom to control. And people have tried to make devices that are all about letting you know. They sense when you've entered REM sleep and then they send a signal to you either by flashing lights in your eyes or putting sound in your ear like hey dummy you're having a dream. You should probably wake up but not actually wake but like be aware of it and figure that out. Maybe I'm crazy but I think this is a whole untapped area that I think somebody is going to find a way in to kind of manage our dream life so that we like it more. Anyway. Because dreams are awesome. Moving on. Unfortunately, the people who are probably going to do it are the people who are advertising people because they have the most reason to do it. Now, let's talk a little bit about the advertising people. They're having a tough time. The print media is taking a beating and that's where they've got a lot of they're money. And TV, who watches ads on TV? Everybody TiVo's and skips it and it could be that that whole TV ad thing collapses. Ads on the Internet are mostly a joke and I think we know that. So the ad people are like: What's going on? So games is one place they're like God, digging their fingernails in trying to figure it out. Initially they tried a lot of sort of nave approaches that don't make a lot of sense. There are a lot of times you can't just take any ad and inject it into any game, that just doesn't really work very well. So then they tried making games based around products. There's a whole bunch of them, you go online and play the Sweet Tarts game. For some reason these are always about sugar. I don't know why that is but that does seem to be the case. So they've done these and these are okay. I mean, but it kind of only goes so far so these guys are trying new things. Seven Eleven cut a deal with Zynga so that if you play Farmville and if you go to Zynga and you buy a Slurpy there's a code on the cup and you get farm cash in Farmville for every Slurpy that you buy. I think this is just the beginning because these virtual economies in these games are powerful. We want to make more of our virtual money, we want more world [INAUDIBLE] we want more Farm cash. And the advertisers are waking up and like we can give you that. That's easy that's just like a little data thing and "boop" we gave you imaginary money. We'll give you that if you'll pay attention to our product, sure. And those advertising people man, they're sneaky. You've got to keep an eye on them because they get in there and they figure it out. So here's a graph of commercial time from 1950 to 2010. It went from 13% of television time, it's now 36%. Did anyone notice? That's how they snuck it in. They took 50 years to freaking sneak it in, but they did, they creep it up, they creep it up. Remember when they added the logo in the corner so that every second that you're watching television they're burning a brand into your brain? Nobody liked it but we didn't stop it. We couldn't make it not happen. Or what if I told you that a major corporation was going to scan every email you received and every email you sent and build a personalized digital profile of what it thought you were interested in and then every time you tried to read email it would pop up distractions custom crafted to pull your eyes away from your email to distract you. It sounds horrifying and it's called gmail. We're all like, yeah that's cool I like gmail, I think that's pretty great. It's all free and stuff. So advertising is insidious. Or like man I grew up in New Jersey and we used to go to Shea Stadium. Yeah, screw Shea Stadium now it's CitiBank Stadium. Hooray for San Francisco. You took back Candlestick Park. It's not Monster Park anymore so good job at least for the next five minutes because it's going to be Zynga Park I'm sure in like 20 minutes. So everybody enjoy Candlestick Park for the brief moment that it lasts. Okay. Anyway, us as game designers we're going to have new weird shit to deal with that we weren't used to. It used to be we just made a game and tried to make it awesome and now we're going to have all these weird ethical decisions to make that we didn't have to make before. The print media people have had to do this. Somebody at Wired Magazine had to say: Yeah Camel cigarettes, will our magazine convince more people to buy and smoke Camel cigarettes? Yeah. And then had to make a sales pitch to Camel. Yeah we think so. We think here's why. We think the people who read Wired are likely to be influenced by these ads, blah, blah, blah and they had to do that and decide that they felt good about doing that. Games people we don't normally have to do that. We're going to have to do it and it's going to be way worse. Advergaming is going to be a big piece of this and some of that is going to be pretty scary. So a cultural trend. Beauty. Let's talk about beauty. One of the things that's wonderful about the 21st century, everything is getting so freaking beautiful. Oh my gosh, just everywhere you turn. I mean, you go to the grocery store and it used to be I remember thirty years ago you used to buy a toothbrush they came in one shape and three colors and that was it. Now it's like a tropical fish aquarium. They're all sizes and colors and shapes and textures. It's amazing. Things are beautiful. Remember when telephones were ugly? And now it's like oh my telephone is so beautiful. We hold it up as a standard. This telephone is a standard of beauty and interface. I'm like a telephone, really? But that's just how it is. And we certainly see it in the video game world. Our video games are getting more and more beautiful all the time. So this is like a big trend. And even architecture, I just was in the UK, I gave a talk in this building, I was at the Game Horizon Conference, this is a 21st century building. It's freaking gorgeous. You can't help but look at this building. I mean, we wouldn't have built that in the 20th century. In the 20th century we build all this crap down here, blah. In the 21st century we build stuff like that because we just want things that are beautiful. Oh, oh, everyone should read this book; have people read this book, The Rational Optimist? This has become one of my favorite books ever. The premise of the book is: Yeah, you know how everyone is always complaining about it's the freaking end of the world and everything is so bad and everything's getting worse and worse. This book says no, no it's not. Look at all the numbers, everything is getting better. Hunger is getting better. Crime is getting better. Pollution is getting better, better, better, better. Everything is getting so much better and it backs it all up. And it's like oh man. This 21st century is going to be awesome if you look at these numbers and even if it's not it's going to at least be beautiful. It's going to be pretty. This is definitely a trend that we're seeing. People want more beauty in their lives so the question comes with television. I'm going to take a little side note her to talk about 3D TV, because everyone is like yeah 3D TV. We went from regular to HD now we're going to go to 3D. That's going to be amazing and everyone's going to buy it. And just putting it out there, I don't know if I believe that, that that is the case. I've worked with 3D a lot. You know, I did all these theme park things and I made this Toy Story maze in glorious 3D and it's really great, it's super fun in a theme park but in your house everyday 3D. I will point out that stereoscopy was invented in 1849 about the same time as photography. It's not technically difficult to do if you want it, every picture that you ever took could be in 3D but you don't do that because you don't freaking care. If you thought 3D was so awesome all of your snapshots would be in 3D. But, no, you don't think it's that awesome, you think it's kind of a novelty reserved for certain places. So if we don't want it for our photography, I don't know if we want it with all of our television. I don't know if people realize Alfred Hitchcock made a 3D movie, he made "Dial in For Murder" in 3D, but when he saw how it came out he was so disappointed with his ability to use 3D to achieve meaningful dramatic effect he wouldn't release it in 3D. There were prints eventually released but the premiere was not in 3D and I'm like man If Alfred Hitchcock can't pull it off, what's the hope that the rest of us have? I think 3D TV is probably more like 5.1 stereo surround sound than it is HD TV. Rich nerds will have it and everyone else will go to their house now and then. Okay moving on from TV. Another trend is the trend of customization. We see this all over the video game world. There's a big change in video games. Everybody it used to be there's Mario and you've got Mario, now you've customized the heck out of your characters. People expect it. But it's not just in video games. People are customizing everything because they can. This isn't some made up thing. This is real. You can go do this now. You can be eating your face right now. We're seeing it everywhere. We're seeing it in board games. There's this big line of Lego board games that's coming out. And look I don't know if there are board game nerds out there but Reiner Knizia, he's the designer of this thing. He's a for real game designer. There's a whole bunch of these things. And it's cool you build the board and you build it different every time. It's like everything is becoming customizable. And this is an important trend. One of the ways we're really going to see it being important is this eye and face tracking in the next ten to 20 years is going to be very, very influential. Right now we see it when you put a camera on, the camera draws and sometimes if you have a fancy camera it draws squares over your kid's faces and you're like what the hell is this? And presumably it's doing something important, but I don't know but it scares me when I see it and it's like I don't know what youre doing camera and it's kind of scary. Our ability to track and sense faces, one of the ways it's going to be used is with massively multi-player gaming to be able to track your facial expression and map it right onto an avatar. This is going to go a long way, this is going to allow you not just to customize the look but as you speak and express you're going to actually be able to put your own expression and personality into characters in ways we haven't seen before and that's going to be very important. And you know while we're talking about facial tracking, faces are like really easy to tell apart, that is partly why our faces differ so much and we have all this hardware on our heads so we can tell each other apart, otherwise we'd be really confused about who is who. That's just part of being a human. Well, people have been starting to develop these technologies like "Recognizer." Hold up your iPhone and it's like oh I know who that is and "boop" it pops up their twitter and all this crap right around them and you can see the look on their face, it's like will you put that crap down and talk to me. And they picked the name recognizer, that's not like creepy at all. It has no connotations with being creepy. Anyway, but think about how you put public photos of yourself online if you've ever done that, very soon people will be harvesting those to make a giant database of who's who so you can play games with that. Imagine a game where it's like you've got to take pictures and you get points every time you find someone you've never seen before with your phone. But probably, I don't think it would be so much games, I think it would be more practical applications, connect that to social networking and you get stuff like this. Oh yeah, that's who that is, oh he knows my brother, then you have a conversation starter with people which is sort of cool and useful. Then you start thinking about all the other data that's out there and how you would probably be able to walk down the streets since we know the addresses and we can look stuff up with the car license plates and it's like here's who lives in that house and here's how old they are and here's which car belongs to what house and it starts to be terrifying. It's like wait a minute, who gave up this information? We all gave it up, because we didn't think anyone could see it. We thought obscurity would keep us safe and it wouldn't. It's a lot kind of like Adam and Eve and who like ate the apple and they're like oh we're naked, what the hell. We're all naked. I'm just telling you right now and pretty soon we're going to eat the apple and realize uh oh what are we going to do about this? But, that's not my problem to solve. While we're talking about that, why stop with just facial recognition? We now have these kind of mind sensors, you know brain sensors, can sense brain activity and different kinds of brain activity and that's sort of cool. People are making games with a levitating ping pong ball, whatever, that's kind of cool. But think about how education could change if you could suddenly, teachers out there monitoring like what's going on with different kids. And that's kind of horrifying to think about but on the other side it could be very, very positive because imagine a school where they're like "we don't care what you're working on as long as you're thinking hard." Customize the holy hell out of your education and as long as you're thinking hard we're happy. Is that good or bad? I don't know. Moving on. This leads me to the next topic, something I refer to as the curiosity gap that the internet has brought us. It's this way, it used to be if you were curious about something, it could be freaking hard to get the information about it. There's certain topics, you had to go to the library, the library is closed. You get there they don't have the right books; you had to work hard to get information. A kid today who wants to find out about, I don't know, what does piezoelectric mean? Boom, there's the information right there. A kid wants to make a robot; boom here's a million plans for robots. Here's how you do it. Here's how to instructions. Here's a video of a guy who did it and you just have an infinite amount of information. What this means is curious people have an insane advantage because they can learn anything they want incredibly fast. People who are not curious are going to be left behind, creating this curiosity gap between the curious and the incurious. What this implies is that the most important thing that we can do for our children is not to give them facts or figures or techniques but to make them curious. The problem is we don't know very much about curiosity at all. We know very little about it and we certainly don't know whether it's possible to instill it. Are you born with it? Do your parents give it to you? Can it be taught? Who took a class that made them more curious? We don't know and it may be the most important thing. I hope we figure it out because I really do believe if we don't figure this out; it's going to lead to a significant revolution in education where education will go from being standardized to customized because customized education is better. Who wins out in the world? The guy with the standardized education or the person who got so excited about one topic that they got better at it than anyone in the world? That's the person who wins and that's exactly what our education system does not do. Moving on. Oh my goodness, thank you. Don't clap I'm not done, baby. We've got half a map to go. I mentioned authenticity before and this is a really important trend. People do want things that are more real and to connect with things that feel more real to them. And this is a big part of the rise of social networking. So let me explain social networking. It's a fancy term that means Facebook. So wait this is serious, raise your hand if you're not on Facebook. Oh man, alright, good for you, I give you a week. Things on Facebook, people speak of things going viral. Remember when viral was bad? Now viral is awesome, it's really good and the reason is because when people talk about things going viral they usually mean it in a good way. Things go viral for four reasons: They're funny; they're very helpful; they're unique; or they're amazing or spectacular or they're controversial. These are all reasons that things go viral and those are all kind of good meaningful reasons for a thing to go viral but with all this talk of viral people often forget there are bad viruses. Bad viruses that make you sick and unhappy and not just in the real world no like in the virtual world, as well. And this has been one of the things. A lot of these businesses in this universe have been all about spamming the holy hell out of you and your friends and that works really well for a virus, it kind of spreads everywhere but if it's a virus that makes you sick and you don't like it and you roll your eyes when that little pop up comes, well guess what's going to kick in? The immune system. And there are two immune systems working in Facebook right now. One of them is the people who use Facebook. At first it's like oh someone sent me a cow. I guess it's kind of cool but very quickly you're like no, no, hide, hide, hide, hide application, hide user, hide Facebook. The second one is Facebook itself. They started to change their rules because they see people are disgusted with it and they start changing the rules. Nope you can't send this kind of spam anymore and so double immune systems are kicking in for things that are the unhealthy kind of viral. But, there is the good kind of viral. So if you're going to make things that are viral, make them the good kind of viral not the bad kind because the immune system is going to kick your butt. Another aspect of authenticity is the idea of transmedia worlds. It's weird to say this but people want their fantasy worlds to feel real. Okay that's strange, but it's true. One of the aspects of these transmedia worlds is that they have many, many points of entry, that you can get to them from books, and you can get to them from TV and from different kinds of games and maybe from a toy or that there are many ways to get there. And it's the people who are figuring out the rules, not so much the rules for a game or a book but like what are the rules of a world that make it seem real and solid? Because some worlds are really succeeding this way and some kind of aren't quite as well. It's interesting to compare Lord of the Rings which is a big transmedia win and Narnia which somehow isn't holding up there. And people are just starting to understand this in terms of enduring worlds they're going to creep into every aspect of your life. You've got to understand the transmedia because it's a huge trend in gaming right now. And this actually relates in an interesting way to what's going on in the music industry. It used to be the musician cut a deal with a record label and it was all about making records and that was what they did and they might deal with someone else to get their concerts. Now they do these new things they call 360 deals where the record label is like no, no, no we'll handle everything for you. The music and the concert and your magazine stuff and your merchandise and your deal with the video game companies and your TV appearances and it's like all one deal. And this happened because the foolish music industry relied entirely on like you know they distributed things on discs and they sold them that way and the game industry would never be so dumb as to do oh crap. That's exactly what they're doing. Piracy is starting to sneak up on them and it's going to be more and more of a problem, but once you have transmedia worlds where it's not just the game that matters but having it in many parts of your life then they have a property that's worthwhile. Okay so you've got transmedia world and here's another technology that ties in with authenticity. Speech recognition. This has been super slow. I remember when I was a kid it's like oh ten years away you're going to have speech recognition, it will be awesome and then ten years later it's like where is it. They're like oh don't worry it's just ten years away. I was talking to Kevin Kelly today and we were talking about speech recognition, he says look I figure it will be here in about ten years. I'm like yeah sure I guess. I don't know but it is creeping up. We have it, you can like make a phone call mostly and that kind of works. So Chris Swain of USC makes this awesome analogy about video games and their importance in the 21st century. He says video games right now are like silent films were at the beginning of the 20th century. People didn't take silent films seriously. They're cute they're kind of funny. They're a bunch of nerds who thought they were awesome and amazing in this little niche community, but the community at large nah that's not real entertainment. There was a technological breakthrough, boom, the films could talk and all of a sudden everything changed. And films became the dominant medium of the 21st century. They became the literature of the 20th century I mean rather and they took over. They displaced print as the medium of the time. Well, Chris Swain suggests that the video games are going through something similar but, of course, they can talk but what they can't do is they can't listen. Once they can listen to us and understand our words and understand the meaning behind our words and react meaningfully to us, when that can happen something changes. We are now in a new medium. Can you imagine a medium where you can't get through the adventure unless you like persuade the character that like no, no I'm sincere, when I'm telling you this, no I'm going to change? If you actually had to bring real emotion into the experience when you are interacting with the characters, that's a level of medium that we haven't had before. And it's interesting to think about games because games subsume all other media. I can put a book in a game, or a movie in a game or a song in a game, I can put anything in a game. Games live outside everything; ultimately they will subsume every technology that they touch. And the other cool thing about speech is it lets me find new nooks and crannies. You know, I can play video games a lot. I cannot play them in the car and I tell you I have tried. It's not a good idea. But imagine if I'm driving and like I don't need a screen and it's like uh oh there's two orks coming at you, I'm like get my sword out and attack those orks. And I could just talk with this thing and it's like I just have a conversation because I can talk to a person in a car that's fine, if I could talk to my game system and have it be a game that would be freaking awesome. Anyway, every new sensor, every new technology gives you a new nook and cranny. Geotracking. Let's talk about geotracking. You see this a lot. You can track where you are with GPS and people talking about Foursquare and everything and I need to make a little aside about this. I don't know if people have seen this movie, "Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel." It's really awesome and I'm going to show you just a short clip of something that I think is relevant. Hopefully the audio is good for this. Can we get that louder? Anyway this is an awesome movie, by the way. This is an excellent movie, but I bring this up because it sounds really funny and he calls himself, you know I'm not a nerd, I'm an Imagineer and it sounds like no that just making himself important. But there's something here; right? Because nerd is like a phrase we use for just anybody who's bookish or antisocial. What he's getting at by saying no, no, no we're Imagineer's, he means we love to explore fantasy worlds. That's what he's sort of getting at is that's what he's about, exploring these fantasy worlds. And there are people who are really, really into fantasy worlds. Then there are other people who cannot comprehend that at all. It seems totally alien to them. And we don't talk about this psychological dichotomy but it's very, very real. You probably know people in your life who kind of lean towards the Imagineer side or lean towards the other side and it needs a name and I call them the mundanes. Mundane pertaining to worldly things, real things and things that are ordinary. There is this battle. There are people that are that way. And this is important because we are about to see these guys go crunch, like this, because right now the Imagineers own fantasy game play. Real game play in the real world, all our sports is owned by the mundanes. No sport has any element of fantasy in it at all, ever. That's just how it is. And so there's a kind of battle that's going to go on once we start to geotrack people and we try to take fantasy gaming elements and bring them to the real world. Now, what's funny is these guys actually appear to have a lot in common. They don't seem that different to me, but there is something fundamental keeping them apart. So people say Foursquare, and I say oh Foursquare is okay, it's kind of boring, I mean I'm either Mayor of a thing or I'm not and I don't know I think it's a novelty, I'm not sure it's going to last. And people say oh no, no, no thats just the beginning, that's just the platform. People are going to take like Foursquare and like combine it with World of Warcraft and this fantasy thing and I'm like Foursquare plus World of Warcraft equals larping. And it's interesting to think about why do we feel that way about larping. There's something fundamentally weird to us about it and either we'll stay that way and these two worlds will have to stay apart somehow or maybe they'll find ways to come together because fighting is awesome. Fighting is like totally cool and fun and why, I think it's about five minutes away from somebody saying hey this Wii mote is cool in my living room but what if I made a battery powered one and put it in a foam sword and it could measure how fast I'm swinging it and it could measure when I have contact with somebody and it will automatically transfer the hit point damage to him based upon how much his armor has already absorbed? I mean that would be sort of cool. I think that's going to happen and I think people are going to start doing that. And the question is: Will it be a sport like fencing? Or will it be a fantasy oriented thing? Or will it be both? I have a suspicion there's a real opportunity for people to make theme parks out of this that are more immersive. It's funny because I think about the movie "West World" but that's sort of what we're talking about. You can't go and have a week long fantasy experience for the most part right now, but what if you could? What if there were actors and you had these digital swords and stuff that tracked your points and you really had to dig real treasure with a real shovel out of the ground and oh my gosh were ambushed and there's horses? And you could do these things. That could happen. And I think the biggest one of all will be, I call it World of Warcraft World or WOWW for short, I think. Anyway so there's a prediction. But, of course, the advertisers will catch up with all of this pretty soon and you'll go and fight the cola wars or whatever. Okay. We're getting toward the end here. So another important trend. Sharing. Sharing is a huge thing in the 21st century. Everybody is sharing everything. They're sharing music. And they're sharing messages. They're sharing ideas. When I heard about Wikipedia, I'm like no that's not going to work. That's like the worst idea ever. If everyone can edit the encyclopedia it gets better? No. It's going to be the worst encyclopedia ever. No it's awesome. This is possibly the crowning achievement of humanity. So people love sharing. They love to share and games give them a lot of opportunities to share. And we've seen this in some games. Little Big Planet, you get to make levels and share them and they've shared two million levels with each other and it's cool and it's awesome and it's a huge trend. It applies in surprising places. So one of the trend things coming technologically is cloud gaming and so On Live is one of these and the whole idea is that you don't have to have a graphics computer in your house any more. You hit the jump button and "boop" a signal goes up to a remote server that renders like the next frame and then video streams it to you and then the graphics computer is far away and you don't have a computer to upgrade and deal with all that crap and you're playing somehow magically at a distance and if it works it's really, really cool. Now some people criticize Cloud Gaming, they say wait a minute, wait a minute I'm not sure this is going to work. They say On Live is kind of like wine in a box. So you think about wine in a box for a second. How do wine connoisseurs feel about it? They say no, no I want wine in a bottle. Just like game connoisseurs will say no, no I must have crisp graphics. I need to have them right here, I need hyper low latency. You know I can't have a network latency, if we want to hit the jump button that's not going to work. So they want one in a bottle so now what about people with less money? Do they want wine in a box? They're like no we want beer. Just like the game people, they're like no I can play Bejeweled or Tetris that's fine I don't need a big graphics computer I can play it on my watch. So they don't need it. They want beer, so who the heck is wine in the box for? Cloud Gaming may fall into that, but on the other hand I'm watching what the online guys are doing and it's really smart. When you look at they're menu about all the things you can do, most of them are about sharing. So one of the things you can do in these things is you log on and it's like "boop" here's all your friends and here's the games they're playing right now. Do you want to watch one of them and see what they're doing? You can't do that on a normal game console, but you can here because it's just sending video streams. If it sends it to one person or ten people or 100,000 people it doesn't care so it adds this new realm of sharing that wasn't there before. So that's worth thinking about. A couple of more trends, one of them is "quantitative design." The nature of game designing is fundamentally changing. It used to be we did things by gut feel and design principals. More and more, now that we're able to pull so much data from the players live, people are just using numbers. So they're like gee, you know, how many hip points should this weapon do? I don't know put out two weapons and see which one is working better. And they just put them both out and then they look, oh the people who have this many are buying the weapon more, let's make it six hip points instead of four hip points. So they're studying the numbers and then analyzing how people are playing and tuning based on that as opposed to just using gut feel. The companies that are figuring this out are really jumping ahead. Zynga appears that it's something they're really, really in to. I love the book "Good to Great," it talks about ways to run a good business and one thing it points out is that businesses that become really great, they find concrete numbers to judge themselves by. Maybe I should be finding concrete numbers to judge my game by, so we're seeing that. Now for people who are aficionados of Candy Land I place extrinsic rewards right where the Molasses Swamp is and for good reason. This is what everybody wants. This was a little ad I found, "turn the everyday things you do into the dreamiest perks and rewards, with the Disney rewards Visa card." That's what we want, the goal gamification of life is all the ordinary things you do, bing, bing, bing, you're going to get rewards. That makes it better and isn't that nice? Wouldn't that be cool if we could measure everything and give rewards for all the right stuff? I don't know if people know Christopher Alexander, he's the greatest genius of the 20th century. And what if we took his 15 principals of architecture and life and what if we could measure every building and every structure on that and give points for that or for the way you rearranged your house or like this guy? I always liked what G. K. Chesterton said the problem with Christianity is no one's ever tried it. Or what if we had an easier way to give you points and ratings about hey you're doing good Christian ethics, that's good behavior. Would that make things better? Well [INAUDIBLE] says "hell no," and anyone whose anywhere this space should read the book Punish by Rewards, which is all about the fact that study after study after study shows that if you bribe someone to do something, they come to hate that thing. This goes for getting a gold star in school or getting a performance based incentive at work, these things all tear you down. This has huge implications for game design. I wish the psychologists could have told us about this a long time ago, but I don't know what's up with the psychologists quite frankly. They either don't understand about how to be helpful with entertainment or they don't care. If you don't believe me, I've been to their parties. It stands to reason if they know so damn much about the human mind, they're parties would be freaking awesome. But there is hope here. I don't know if people have seen this Couch to 5k? It's awesome. It's a very simple plan for you don't run but you'd like to run a 5k. The Couch to 5k plan is: Here's what you do the first day; here's what you do the second day; here's what you do the third day. And it works. This simple graded system, like the first day you're just real simple, you're going to walk for like 20 minutes and not even that, you're going to walk for five minutes. They make it real, real simple so that the steps are clear and achievable and you get progress. It totally works because they've kind of broken it down in a very interesting kind of gameified way and that totally works. If you're going to make these systems where you're trying to kind of add game principals and reward principals, if you do these four things you're probably going to do it; right? If you make it to the thing you're doing using gauging, in other words it's not an extrinsic reward anymore, it's an intrinsically rewarding thing to do and then that's a win for you. You need to make it effortless. If people have to do work and fill out a card or pull out their phone and hit a button or something to play your game, that's a problem, but if you can make it so that they do almost nothing and it works, that's what's so awesome at Airline Miles one time you sign up for a thing and then the rest of the time all you do is buy a ticket and then bing, bing, bing, bing, points and rewards and it just happens effortless. You've got to make them uncheatable. You've got to make them uncheatable, if you can somehow cheat your game life system then the whole thing falls apart. It's not worth anything to anybody anymore and it can't be embarrassing. People are so easily embarrassed. You might think hey there's a $10 off coupon at a restaurant. A lot of people are kind of embarrassed like "I've got a coupon at the restaurant." They're shy to do this sometimes. You have to think about what's going to be embarrassing and a lot of times public game play, man that can be very embarrassing. When all else fails, personal trainers, they freaking work. That's why rich people are so thin. If you've got a smart person come in your house every day and like yeah do this, don't do that, do this now and they're giving you exactly the right coaching and encouragement at exactly the right time, just what you need, it works. And there's social pressure. You can't just blow the guy off because he's at your house. These things can be made to work and that's kind of the dream that these digital systems can become like little virtual personal trainers that listen and give us just what we need just when we need it, that can change our behavior. Our last item here, whole life tracking. This is what we're moving towards. We're moving towards a time when every single thing we do, every bite we eat, every game we play, everything we do, every dollar we spend we're tracking it, we're tracking it and the people are going to start turning it into games. Part of that is a little terrifying and it sort of means we have some responsibility and we need to think about it. And it means you need to look into your heart a little bit and figure out what the heck you are doing. Because the 21st century will be a war for the attention of humanity. So you have to decide what side you're on and as far as I can figure there are four sides in this war. One is the persuader's. All these guys care about is making money, that's all they want to do. They don't care if it screws up the environment or your life or your kids or whatever, they just want to get the money and get out. So there's those guys. Then there's the fulfillers, these people want to fulfill people's wishes and dreams and desires and hopes. That's why they're in it, that's why they're making these things. Then you've got the artists, they don't really care if it sells and they don't even care if it fulfills people's wishes necessarily. They want to advance their medium. They want to kind of get something new out there. They have this vision that they feel must be brought to life for its own sake. But then you've got the humanitarians who want to make things that will make people's lives better. To be able to use these new technologies and inventions to help us improve physically, mentally and spiritually. And so here are these four guys and the question is: Who's going to win the war on attention in the 21st century? I will remind you of the golden rule, the one with the gold makes the rules and it's scary because a lot of times you might think you're one of these things and really someone else may be kind of controlling you. That's a little scary to think about and the only way you can escape it is to wake the hell up and think about what is going on. What are you doing and why? It's a question. Is it possible for us to out persuade the persuaders? Can we do an end run on them? If we can that's freaking awesome. But the only way we can do it is if we wake the hell up and we think about what we're doing. Because if we can do that then the Gamepocalypse doesn't have to be a horrible thing. It could be kind of groovy because games are awesome and if we integrate all of these games in our lives and we think it's all great and awesome that could be good and we can get there if we become masters of our craft and we're skilled enough to become masters of our craft and we're wise enough to work together and we're brave enough to kind of follow our hearts and we can make the 21st century be a beautiful place indeed. Thank you. 29


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Members in Botswana have expressed their confidence in the direction the IUCN Secretariat has taken in mobilizing the members towards the implementation of the IUCN programme. This was expressed at the meeting the members had with the IUCN Regional Director, Mr Ali Kaka in Gaborone Botswana on August 13, 2009.
Hosted by the State member, the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism; the meeting was convened to give an opportunity to the members to meet the new Regional Director and get updates from the Secretariat. During the meeting members were also briefed on the final IUCN-ESARO 2008 – 2012 Programme and the "One-Programme" approach to its implementation.
For more information, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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Cinnamon Swirl Bread
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Click the heart, it's called favoriting. Favorite the stuff you like.Got it!
Author Notes: Before I met my husband Tad, I'd never been to the Hamptons on the east end of Long Island, and now we go, like his family has for decades, every August. But I went on vacations there for 5 years before anyone in his family told me about the cinnamon swirl bread from Breadzilla, a bakery that's tucked away in their tiny hamlet of Wainscott. Breadzilla's piece de resistance is a pan loaf that's poufy on top with a sugary, cinnamon crust, and is loaded up inside with a curl of cinnamon butter. When we're there in the summer, I eat it every morning for breakfast, thickly sliced, toasted and spread with butter and a scattering of sea salt. This is my effort to replicate the bread (though it should be noted that Breadzilla's bread dough is more of a classic white Pullman, not a butter-and-egg dough). My bread dough is adapted from The American Home, December 1965. —Amanda Hesser
Makes: 1 loaf
Prep time: 3 hrs 30 min
Cook time: 1 hrs 10 min
For the bread dough
cup milk
cup room temperature water
package active dry yeast
cup sugar
teaspoon salt
cup unsalted butter, softened
cups sifted all-purpose flour, plus more as needed
large eggs
teaspoon cinnamon
tablespoon sugar
tablespoons melted butter
For the cinnamon filling
tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
teaspoons cinnamon
tablespoons sugar
tablespoons light brown sugar
- Scald the milk by warming it in a pan over medium heat until bubbles form around the edge; remove from the heat and let cool.
- Pour the water into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook (or a large bowl fitted with your hands). Sprinkle the yeast in the water and let proof until fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the cooled milk, sugar, salt, and eggs. Beat in 2 cups flour.
- Add the butter, and beat until the butter is broken up into small curds. Beat in 1 more cup flour. Add enough remaining flour to make a soft dough. Let rest for 5 minutes.
- Knead (in the mixer or by hand), only adding flour as needed, until the dough is soft and velvety and little blisters appear just under the surface. Put into a large well-greased bowl; turn the dough over to bring the greased side up. Cover with a clean damp towel or plastic wrap. Let rise until doubled in bulk, about 2 hours.
- Punch dough down; let rise again for 30 minutes or until almost doubled.
- Heat the oven to 350° F and butter a 9- x 5- x 3-inch loaf pan. In a small bowl, blend the 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 tablespoon sugar. In another bowl, prepare the filling: mash together the butter, cinnamon and sugars with a fork until a smooth paste forms.
- Flatten the dough, seam-side-up, into a rectangle, 8 inches by 12 inches. Spread the cinnamon filling on top, pushing it close to the edges. Roll the dough into a log, tightly sealing the bottom seam, and place seam-side-down in the prepared pan. Loosely cover the dough with plastic wrap and let rest until puffy and nearly doubled in size, about 30 minutes.
- Brush the top of the dough with the melted butter. Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar. Bake until the bread is a chestnut brown and sounds hollow inside when tapped, 45 to 60 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 1 hour then remove the bread from the pan and continue cooling on a wire rack.
- This recipe is a Community Pick!
More Great Recipes:


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August 27, 1842 - March 5, 1862
buried Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New YorkStamford Soldiers' Memorial 1869
Full text of "Stamford soldiers' memorials" - Internet Archives
Fairfield County CT Archives Obituaries - Starr, Grosvenor March 5, 1862
"GROSVENOR STARR, adjutant, 7th Conn. , son of Mrs. Henry B. Starr. Died at Tybee Island, March 5, 1862, after a sickness of five weeks. "Mr. Starr was at the breaking out of the war, a student at Yale. The idol of his classmates, who fondly watched his progress with warm anticipations of his future success, he was distinguished both for his scholarly attainments and his social qualities.
There is no need of many added words to tell what he was. The one title, a Christian soldier, covers all. At the age of fifteen, he girded himself with that heavenly armor, with which the soul encounters its unseen foes-the vows that he then renewed in confirmation. The emblems that were laid upon his coffin as it was borne by his sorrowing classmates to be laid before the altar, when spoken the confirming words of the last service, were his completed epitaph. Above his breast rested the wreath of spotless flowers. Upon the hero's sword, -the gift of his loving classmates,-was placed the cross.
The funeral of Mr. Starr was attended from St. Bartholomew's church New York City, and his remains lie in the family lot in Greenwood."


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Emma Stone has opened up about her "debilitating and embarrassing" battle with acne.
The Help actress hit rock bottom after suffering severe break-outs as a teenager, and she was put on prescription medication to combat her spots.
Emma Stone's pimples returned as she struggled to shoot her first lead role in Easy A, but she admits her skin was made to look flawless in the 2010 comedy.
She tells fashion and beauty website Refinery 29, "I'm actually pretty interested in skin care, because I had bad hormonal acne when I was 17, and they put me on Accutane (acne medication) for it.
"After two months on the Accutane, I went off of it, and since then, my skin, my mouth, my lips, my eyes are all so dry. Then, I had stress acne when I was 20, when I did Easy A, which they kindly video-airbrushed out of the movie.
"But I realized how debilitating and embarrassing it can be to have cystic acne. So, I'm really interested in the biology of what makes up acne and how to work on it from the outside, too."


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Lights. Lights everywhere.
The Senate House State Historic Site on Fair Street in Uptown Kingston is hosting its Festival of Lights and Snowflake Festival on Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. which is also a good reminder that the Freeman is seeking submissions for its annual Holiday Lights tour. We always try to add a few surprises and Easter Eggs to the map, and submissions are starting to come in. Submit!
Labels: Holiday Lights.


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Organiser: David Tong (University of Cambridge), Julian Sonner (University of Cambridge), Neil Lambert (King's College London)
Workshop Theme
Recent developments have highlighted the common language and problems shared by condensed matter theorists and high energy theorists. On the condensed matter side, ideas of quantum criticality and topological order are becoming increasingly important. Meanwhile, on the high energy side the development of the AdS/CFT correspondence has provided a new tool to explore strongly interacting systems.
The lectures in this school will be aimed at graduate students and young researchers from both condensed matter and high energy communities. They will combine introductory lectures together with more advanced topics. Each speaker will give a course of 3-4 lectures.
Lecture topics include: Introduction to AdS/CFT, Gravity and Hydrodynamics, Non-Fermi Liquids, Quantum Criticality and Topological Phases of Matter.


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SOURCE: Research Driven Investing
February 07, 2013 08:20 ET
RDInvesting Provides Stock Research on CONSOL Energy and Natural Resource Partners
RDInvesting Provides Stock Research on CONSOL Energy and Natural Resource Partners
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Feb 7, 2013) - Despite a steep drop in domestic demand the outlook for the coal industry remains positive as foreign demand continues to grow. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently reported that China coal consumption is nearly equal to the rest of the world combined. Research Driven Investing examines investing opportunities in the Coal Industry and provides equity research on CONSOL Energy Inc. (NYSE: CNX) and Natural Resource Partners LP (NYSE: NRP).
Access to the full company reports can be found at:
The EIA reported that China's coal consumption increased 9 percent to 3.8 billion metric tons in 2011, which was its 12th consecutive yearly increase. China now accounts for approximately 47 percent of global coal consumption. The EIA has stated that China has accounted for 82 percent of the growth in coal demand since 2000. According the International Energy Agency, China was not only the largest coal producer in 2011, accounting for roughly 46 percent of global production, but also the largest importer, importing approximately 177 million metric tons in 2011.
"[There are] enhanced opportunities for exports of American coal to China to feed some of that demand," says Heath Knakmuhs, senior director of policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute. "While China does have significant internal coal resources they're often far away from load centers. It does provide an opportunity for American coal suppliers -- especially those located in the western U.S. to export enhanced amounts to China."
Research Driven Investing releases regular market updates on the Coal Industry so investors can stay ahead of the crowd and make the best investment decisions to maximize their returns. Take a few minutes to register with us free at www.RDInvesting.com and get exclusive access to our numerous stock reports and industry newsletters.
CONSOL Energy is one of the leading diversified energy companies in the United States of America. The company operates 18 mining complexes throughout Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. Their premium Appalachian coals are sold worldwide to electricity generators and steelmakers. For 2013, CONSOL Energy expects 5 to 10 million tons of its coal, across all sales categories, will be exported.
Natural Resource Partners primarily owns coal, aggregate and oil and gas reserves across the United States. The company leases its properties to coal mine operators in exchange for royalty payments. As of December 31, 2011, the company owned or controlled approximately 2.3 billion tons of proven and probable coal reserves.
Research Driven Investing has not been compensated by any of the above-mentioned publicly traded companies. Research Driven Investing is compensated by other third party organizations for advertising services. We act as an independent research portal and are aware that all investment entails inherent risks. Please view the full disclaimer at:
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Family Package - from SEK 1745 per night
Treat yourself and your family to a lovely stay in our beautiful city! At the Sheraton Stockholm Hotel, you'll find yourself comfortable and close to everything. Old Town, the Royal Castle and the ferries are only a short walk away. Buses to Djurgården, where you will find Skansen, the Vasa Museum and Grönalund (Stockholm's main amusement park) are around the corner. So is the central station, with fast connections to the airport as well as trains and buses within Stockholm.
From only SEK 1745 per night enjoy:
- An overnight stay in a double room (kids up to 12 stay for free in their parents room)
- Our delicious breakfast buffet
- An additional, connecting room can be booked for half price
- Kids up to 12 eat for free from the 360° kids menu
With an average space of 26 square meters, our family rooms are among the most spacious in Stockholm. They are also equipped with two large and super comfortable Sheraton Signature Sleep Experience Bed. If needed, there is plenty of space for an extra bed. With our generous family package you will also have the opportunity to book an additional, connecting room for half price. This allows you to relax in your respective rooms but still have each other closeby.
Stockholm - family friendly and lots to see
Kids up to 12 years eat for free
Leave cooking, planning and other everyday chores at home and just enjoy being together! Kids up to 12 years eat for free from the children's menu (when accompanied with a paying adult). Since we know that young children may find it difficult to sit still, they receive a small entertainment kit upon arrival at the restaurant. This way, the little ones are happy and you'll have a greater opportunity to really enjoy our fine wines and our well-prepared food.
Never far away from family fun in Stockholm
Stockholm is both an exciting and family friendly city. We're happy to give you tips on how to best experience it and we'll see too it that both you and your little ones have a good time and get a well-deserved break from everyday life.
From only 1745 per night!
For any questions or requests for connecting rooms, email: firstname.lastname@example.com or call 08-4123502.
Warm welcome!