Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Walter Jon Williams’ This is Not a Game where an intrepid young Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designer creates gets caught in a situation beyond her control. To save herself, she uses her followers to save her bacon. Fun book. It holds some interesting moral decisions in the end. Highly recommended.

Then I watched the TED Conference talk of Jane McGonigal (below), where she wants to transform game players into a future resource.

These two endeavors side-by-side are excellent examples of science fiction becoming fact, and part of the transition between an experienced future vs. an engineered future. However, they’re late to the game. Getting people to play games to control their behavior is already occuring.

Control over a populace’s behavior is the favorite pasttime of governments. Democratic governments seek to control the press for popular support for an governmental action (Hilter’s tell the big lie from Mein Kampf). Totalitarian government have more overt ways of “gaming” the populace - in fact, I’d argue that Boys Scouts, religions, fraternal orders all have their elements of gameplay and “levelling up.” Every time I hear someone saying “I’m a deacon/brother/wizard/level 6 in my church/fraternity/klan/scientology group” my first reaction is to wonder “So how much did that cost you?”

Even more recently Wikileaks revealed that the CIA has been playing the Europeans to get them to change their support for the war - a delta of behavior patterns.

Now, these two endeavors are about guiding this to “good actions”: solving murders, treating gamers as a resource. But the biggest issue here is that planting trees in FarmVille doesn’t save the planet carbon concerns, so we need to migrate to a different model.

The obvious model is a non-profit game company that champions a cause: “Play Tubman’s RailRoad Tycoon and we’ll send money to free modern slaves.” But the money exchange is short sited.

Better ideas: to create a pyramid scheme of people who tutor other people. The more you tutor, the more they tutor, and in return, you “level” up. A competition between teams - say like in Eve conglomerates - where the goal is to actually recover a failed economy state. What if we *did* tie the gold in World of Warcraft to an actual failed-state economy like Nigeria? People from all over the world would be able to exchange that currency for goods, thus creating demand and support. I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking of such things, but as such the opportunity is pretty endless.

However, we must not think this has never happened before. We’re all players and victims of our own games we create and join every day.