photo credit: ricardodiaz11

Everything about the marketing of New Songdo City feels like a crazy Paleo-Future-esque throwback to the 1950s with updated stock photography. Gale International’s Google search result tagline is, no joke, “Building Tomorrow’s Communities Today”.

The very idea of a city in a box seems to have been ported whole cloth from an era of TV dinners, robot helpers, inflatable furniture, and convenience at the touch of a button. It denies a need for contextual development, or responses to local conditions. This is the machines for living and the mass manufactured utopian nightmare that we are meant to have left behind.

The city itself is explicitly a generic anyplace.

Songdo IBD boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House.

Songdo IBD A Master Plan Inspired by the World

It feels like the only place that isn’t mentioned is the country that the city will call home – South Korea.

It’s a project reminiscent of EA’s Spore, a game which culminates in you choosing a ‘civilization architecture’ and then then flying around the universe launching seed colonies that all grow up to look the same (local conditions are only respected in that if you build the city underwater or in a poisonous atmosphere, a dome covers the works).

It’s the architecture of glossy globalism, the glittering light side of Baudrillard’s patio. It’s the consistent dream of every major franchise and perfectly appropriate to the bland abstracted face of international business. It’s BLDGBLOG’s Thirteeth Room re-conceived on a massive scale.

You can picture a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel; the overstressed, underslept protagonist proceeds in a haze from city to city, complaining about how all airports and hotels look the same only to find themselves in an entire city that looks the same. Have they gone mad? They’ve never been here before, they’re certain of this. But they have been. They know every street corner, every by-way. They can direct the cab driver better than the GPS.

photo credit: lostmodern.net

What about a globe-hopping sci-fi detective novel? A case sends our hero across borders. He’s ostensibly on unfamiliar ground but he knows where the dive bar where someone very much like his regular contact will be. He can find the right chop shops and has a pretty good idea of where the dealers will be, which neighbourhood will have the right kind of corrupt cops.

The effect, useful at first, becomes maddening. Identity begins to shift and blur. He knows passwords for underworld watering holes he’s never been to. He can’t remember if the dame he’s seeing now is the same as one who hired him in the first place.

In an airport lobby, he meets someone very like himself who claims he’s investigating a crime with details that eerily match our hero’s. Is it the work of a serial killer? A copycat? They pool resources.

His GPS starts going on the fritz, and it keeps showing him in different countries. He gets into scrapes, he’s beaten to unconsciousness and when he wakes up he’s not sure what continent he’s on anymore. He stumbles through the tourist district asking if anyone can tell him. No one seems to know or care.

In a hotel he’s sure he’s been to before with staff who don’t recognize him, he confronts his partner. Who is he anyway? How does he know so much about the murders? A strange coincidence that they should just meet. His partner shows him a newspaper, another murder in another city, very much like theirs but ten years before. The first city, the pilot program. It was all hushed up.

Sorry, I shouldn’t call it a lake and certainly not the #fakelake. It’s a reflecting pool.

photo credit: joesflickr

The pool will be decked out with a dock, Ontario cottage country’s signature Muskoka chair, canoes, and the recorded sound of calling loons. In the background, a 10-meter screen will show a video loop of cottage fun. According to spokesperson for Muskoka tourism, Michael Lawley, the goal is “to recreate a dock experience” for the thousands of journalists who will be in town to cover the G8 and G20 event. “We’re trying to make a memorable impression,” he said. Indeed.

It’s difficult to read about the plans for the pavilion without asking a lot of impertinent questions about whether the loons will be audible over the press conferences, whether there will be enough chairs for everyone, and what, exactly, is Muskoka tourism’s idea of cottage fun. Will they play beer commercials? Canada’s opposition parties are having a grand old time attacking the project. How could they not? It’s such an obviously terrible idea that from the outside, it’s very difficult to understand how anyone could approve the thing.

There’s a kind of mad evolutionary logic at play. Canada is hosting the G20 and G8 summits back to back and the original plan had them both happening in the Industry Minister’s home riding in a town called Huntsville (pop. 18,000). This explains how Muskoka tourism got involved.

When it became clear that the town couldn’t actually handle the thousands of dignitaries, journalists, security, and protestors, the G20 got moved to Toronto. Only 200 of the thousands of journalists will be permitted to attend the G8. The rest will have to monitor it from afar. You can imagine the frustration, the angry phone calls, and then the master of compromise who suggests, “What if we bring the Muskokas to them?”

photo credit: isafrancesca

Meanwhile, the second insane evolutionary process plays out as the weekend of meetings is encased in a protective shell, the design of which has been refined and re-refined since the embarrassing 1999 Seattle protests.

True to the spirit of globalization, the system of fences, security, and protest is nearly indistinguishable from event to event and place to place. Subtopia talks about it as a travelling stage show but it’s much weirder than that.

In a travelling stage show, the same cast puts on a performance in different venues. But almost none of the players in these events are the same. Protestors and security forces are largely drawn from the local populace. Even the special guest-starring international cast of civil servants, world leaders, and journalists rotate constantly, subjected as they are to the ravages of promotion, demotion, cabinet shuffles, and failed re-election.

This isn’t a travelling show, this is theatre companies mounting the same production all over the globe. When it comes to the performance at the fence, the one thing that remains constant is the set decoration and costume design. The same 12′ steel sheet with concrete feet snaking around the city. The same black hoodies and face bandanas. The same riot shields and batons. The same tear gas and smoke and pepper spray.

Managers at Starbucks and McDonalds would kill for a global brand this consistently implemented.

photo credit: Ducklover Bonnie

Here’s City of Sound talking about the APEC fence in 2007.

I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the “sniper-ridden ring of steel”, watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

City of Sound The Anti-Fun Palace

Notice that only the name of the city distinguishes it from BlogTO heading out to gawk at our instantiation.

There’s been much made of the recent start of construction on the G20 security fence in Toronto. But, lacking a good conception of its size and breadth, I decided to mosey on down to the area around the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see what I could find out about this thing. As it turns out, I got a pretty good idea for how intense the police and security presence will be.

BlogTO Toronto’s G20 fence in photos.

In fact you could (and should) read all of City of Sound’s fantastic post about the APEC 2007 fence and apply it to the one in Toronto. (Seriously, I cannot recommend the post highly enough.)

These are mimetic structures. Their design is transmitted all over the globe, reproduced via security conferences, marketing materials, anarchist forums, and planning committees. From the perspective of the city it’s a weird malignant parasite that arrives, takes over, completes its terrible purpose, and then neatly self-disassembles.

In the midst of all this, our main university is closed, our baseball team is playing its home games in another city, our streets are ringed with steel and police and snipers, our windows are boarded up, and our most recognizable landmark has been shut down. When the city is least like itself, conference organizers hope to showcase it to the world.

So they release bland stock footage for newscasters. They make models of our famous landmarks. And they build simulacra of the cottage country where the conference should have happened, if all had gone according to plan.

photo credit: shooteng

The chapter they asked me to write about contains one of the most striking passages I’ve read all year. It goes like this:

Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

If that doesn’t give you chills, then perhaps you are reading the wrong website?

The full post is here.

Two other things

First, it didn’t fit into the essay, but I want to build on one of the side notes. I have a minor fascination with city-driving car ads aimed at 20somethings. You know the kind: they are living life’s ups and downs, they are going to parties, there is never any traffic. In particular, I love this Scion ad that wants you to associate parkour with owning a car. The essay flowed away from examining this in more detail, but one of the most interesting things about cars is the interaction between their mythology of freedom and reality of tightly regimented movement.

I’m not just thinking about the stop and go signals of downtown gridlock (though the completely obvious contrast between the far ranging movements of Scion’s free runners and the constrained-to-the-road path of the vehicles is perfectly pertinent). I’m talking about the massive architectural network devoted to creating an environment where cars can roam.

For freedom machines, our vehicles are extremely sensitive. They like surfaces of a certain smoothness and within a range of grades. They hate a great variety of weather conditions. They can’t go far at all without needing to refuel. From a wider perspective, the freedom of the car compared to the herded imprisonment of public transit, airplanes, or rail seems pretty marginal. It’s all one dimensional ribbons of connectivity strung across a vast two dimensional plane.

I’ve talked about this theme in the past, the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Second, I would be completely remiss if I didn’t thank August C. Bourré for pointing me to a number of excellent papers relating to this stuff. The final third of the essay was completely reworked based on material he sent my way.

Go read the guest post.

A courtyard is equipped with plant beds, planters and all sorts of spaces for greenery. It is also wired with automated systems for maintaining and changing the environment and a variety of sensors that can detect both the health of the plants and the presence of people.

This is all tied together in a robotic gardening system that both tracks which plant beds people stop near and cares for them based on the attention given. The ugly plants are allowed to die, to then be replaced by other plants. Over time, a semi-darwinian process results in the most evenly pleasing garden.

These allows for an objective community-driven decision making system that ensures that everyone has a vote and that the stakeholders who use the garden most get the most say in the final layout. It also allows for a crowd-sourced tinkerer-approach to selecting the best plants for a landscape. Lastly, it allows for an garden that shifts contents as time shifts the tastes and character of the users of the space.

Prior Art

• Precision farming
• Robot gardeners
• Talking to your plants
• Natural deselection
• Botanicalls

photo credit: tozzer

Tabloid Science

Why do I say sensationalist? Adam Rothstein of the Interdome explains it best.

William Gibson used the term “Tabloid Science” the other day on Twitter, and this couldn’t be a better example (unless it also threatened to increase global warming, discover aliens, and involved robots becoming self-aware).

This story is, as I understand it, about a guy who figured out how to transmit a computer virus using RFID. And yet, we have this all-star headline, reposted everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. It’s reminiscent of the back pages of popular science magazines (“enslave ants to grow all your woman-attractive pheromones, now only $2.99!”) except this is now science reporting, on the Internet: a domain supposedly rational and free of all that “headline” crap.

Adam Rothstein, private correspondence

From the perspective of the systems being compromised, there is no difference between an RFID attacker that’s moving around the world inside someone’s skin or on top of it. There’s no benefit to doing the implant part of the procedure except that it gets you headlines. Which, I guess, is a pretty big benefit.

There’s something hilariously hair-splitting about how a variation in placement of just a few millimeters – fundamentally cosmetic – makes all the difference in coverage. Malware RFID has been around for years. Here’s the BBC covering it in 2006.

We might be better off conceiving of Dr Gasson’s move as a sort of performance art intervention in the mediasphere.

Under my skin

The tone of coverage speaks directly to the conception of the self. Because the chip is under his skin, the BBC calls it a human infected with a computer virus (though couched in scare quotes) rather than a human wearing a device infected with a computer virus. Slashdot goes further.

Why? I have a much deeper and more integrated relationship with my smartphone than Gasson has with a chip that stays in his body for a few days. It’s like saying that someone with cheap earrings is the first human to rust.

Indeed, the chip as worn by Gasson is substantially less useful than if he’d just stuffed it in his pocket (aside from the “getting media coverage” utility, which we must not dismiss). For one thing, the one in his pocket can be thrown down the sewer when security notices him.

It reminds me of the perennial prediction that cellphone implants are imminent. No they aren’t. Cellphone contracts last 2-3 years and new phones come out even more frequently. Say what you will about the stuff that’s carried on you instead of in you, but at least it’s modular.

For it to be worth accepting implants, they have to offer significant benefits that carry-able items don’t. Medical prosthetics are one obvious category of this kind of thing (though even most of these are things that you wear). Devices or interfaces that give you new senses might be another.

Kevin Warwick’s Project Cyborg 2.0 is relevant here. Implants connected to his nerves allowed him to control a robot arm remotely and to exchange sensations with his wife wirelessly through a rig she also had implanted.

Further intervention

Moving away from hard realities of the current achievement, let’s take for granted for a moment that there will be abilities and senses worth having surgery for. Let’s allow for people with networked nervous systems, reaching far out beyond themselves to a whole host of new conveniences for the modern consumer. I’m thinking about flexible ego boundaries and an artist who replicates Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, 1974 for the cyborg era.

In Rhythm 0, 2014 (2024?) the artist turns off her firewalls and publishes her personal IP and secret key. She is almost immediately compromised by the sea of ambient malware that’s just part of the background Internet. The participant/audience of the performance swoop in and begin a battle to take over and clean her system, while others attempt to reroute it for themselves.

The artist’s body goes haywire. She sometimes shouts the names of consumer pharmaceuticals along with other gibberish. She begins to develop a fever as all of her microcontrollers run at full tilt, generating dangerous amounts of heat. After an hour, her assistant intervenes. Her firmware must be wiped and restored. A great debate erupts in the art world about whether this is a success or a failure of the piece.

The debate is part of the performance.

I leave you with these words from Simon Bostock who pointed me to the BBC article in the first place.

I’m pretty sure the best depiction of flexible ego boundaries I’ve read is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which, if you can get over the fact it’s a space opera about pirates using enforced-autism as a method of slavery and a war between a race of giant spiders, shows how we’ll probably accrete layers of tech and cyborg accoutrements until we all become reefs.

If we’re going to manage our future selves we’ll all have to get a grasp on what topology means.

Simon Bostock, private correpondence

Suggestions include having 72-168 hours worth of food supplies, putting nicely painted plywood over windows, not wearing ties (really), avoiding hospital visits, and being wary of hacktivists. All told, these scenarios would work as a nice backdrop for a Strange Days-esque thriller.

I’m fascinated with this because it reads like a guide for preparing to withstand a hurricane’s landfall. The G20 becomes an Act of God, the anticipated disruptions caused not by any particular group’s actions but by the weird convergence of political and economic turbulence and pressure zones. Through the eyes of the article, the motivations of the actors are abstracted out. I keep thinking of traffic engineers who find it more effective to conceive of masses of commuters as a fluid.

There will be a conference, there will be protests, be sure to dress casually and don’t count on regular train service. Pack an umbrella and mind the tear gas in the afternoon.

One of the projects covered was Amphibious Architecture, an installation of buoys in the East River with environmental sensors and LEDs that communicated the data the sensors were receiving. (Water quality, etc.)

photo credit: somethingstartedcrazy

The coolest piece of the project was the motion sensors that detected fish as they swam by. As they passed through the matrix of buoys, their path was made visible above the surface by lights blinking out and back on. The public loved this element, Benjamin reported. Most people assumed that the river was so polluted that there weren’t any fish left at all. The visible indication of their presence changed residents’ attitudes toward the water.

In Toulouse, they also have a network of lights attached to sensors These are street lamps, erected as part of a trial for saving energy. By default, the streetlights are dimmed. Each one has a heat sensor which monitor the area. If it detects someone, the light brightens.

Imagine Toulose seen from above in real time, the path of its residents traced out by pulses of light. Some areas glow constantly, marking areas of vibrant nightlife. Other areas are calm, with the occasional single ripple of a lone traveller hurrying home down a darkened street. Imagine a map of Toulouse with corresponding LEDs, brightening and dimming in sync with their matching post.

Imagine the cinematic possibilities. A spy thriller in Toulouse. Our hero’s contact has been made and he is fleeing from the enemy. Everywhere he goes, his path is lit. Meanwhile, his assailants proceed methodically, their advance heralded by a glow that seems suffused with dread. Crane shots of the contact’s frantic path through a town square, the converging lights of the hit squad. Out of the darkness, our hero strikes. One by one the assailants are picked off without our hero’s path being lit. How? Dramatically, she opens her trenchcoat, revealing a skin-tight, black, heat suit.

photo credit: Paloetic

Let’s allow some ideological slop for inflation, increasingly complex machines, and perhaps a secret agenda. How far off do you think the estimate is? 2x? 3x? Even at 100 missions, we’re considering two orders of magnitude more trips than the ISS gives us. Listen, I love the International Space Station. It’s right there on the same blurry boundary between architects and cyborgs that the space program was at 50 years ago. No one enjoyed Bruce Sterling’s Dwell interview about ISS living conditions more than me.

But 300! That’s multiple missions to every planet, moon and pseudo planet (we love you, Pluto!) in the solar system. I don’t buy the argument that human spaceflight is more inspiring than robot space flight. Let’s be honest with one another, which was more exciting? The now routine ISS docking and re-crewing procedures, the corporate drenched SpaceShipOne pseudo-flight, or the life and death struggle of Spirit to stay operational on Mars? Let me give you a hint. Two of those missions do not have a fan fiction LiveJournal, nor did they star in an episode of XKCD.

Let’s discuss the moonwalk. For the overwhelming majority of humans it was a media event, just as remote as the guided missile strikes in Iraq. The dream that one day you too could walk on the Moon? Maybe. Maybe that flew in 1969. It’s 2010 now and most of us are not homeric astronaut demigods. We’re dudes and ladies with robot phones and Wii controllers.

Geoffrey Miller is worried that our increasingly compelling virtual content will drive us down a dead end. Better entertainment systems will keep us trapped on the planet as we get more and more into World of Warcraft or whatever. I have a different theory. What if this stuff is all training?

Generations of gamers are getting used to telepresence. We spend all kinds of time projecting ourselves into imagined distant worlds. Why not into real distant worlds? The US military is miles ahead of the rest of us here. Kids in Vegas patrol the roads of Afghanistan. They change shifts, while the robot remains in the air. It’s far more efficient and the vehicles are much, much cheaper.

The dreamed approach of putting humans back on the Moon and then on Mars. This is a high expense, high stakes, high risk proposition and we have only the dimmest idea of what’s there. I like Brooks and Flynn’s idea. Send the robots first.

Send thousands of robots. Little robots – cheap ones that are disposable. More robots than NASA can manage. Fast, cheap, and out of control.

Want to inspire the kids of tomorrow? Forget the heroic myths. That kind of inspiration is over. “Anyone can be the President.” No they can’t. We all know it.

Instead of some guy or another walking on Mars, how about this: “Hey kids of Middlevale Elementary, our class has booked off Mars Swarm Unit 213.3 for the rest of May. We’ll be directing the explorations of an actual robot on Mars.”

“You mean we get to drive an actual Mars robot?!”

Look, the only reason we know a lot of what we do about the water cycle on Mars is because a robot’s wheel got stuck. There’s so much that we don’t know about the planet that we’re just tripping over discoveries. We can’t help but find out new things. We don’t even know if Mars is the most interesting place to go.

By all means, let’s keep experimenting with the social, architectural, and cultural needs of a human space exploration program. But while we work out how to get a small group of people to live in a tiny enclosed space for months on end without killing each other, let’s spend a bunch more time figuring out where we should send them. Send humans to explore, but send robots first.

Are there any botnets that come from either public or private sectors?
“This is our public-sector botnet.” Boy, I’d like to see one of those.

Bruce Sterling in More Cyberwar Semantics at Beyond the Beyond

photo credit: Beverly & Pack

After years of rumoured increases in the number and sophistication of attacks on the nation’s public and private networked infrastructure, groups claiming to be from North Korea declare all out cyberwar. The U.S. government realizes that it needs its own, bigger, botnet to strike back. Rather than risk secure military computers, to say nothing of the hardware procurement and deployment time, the innovative Cyber Home Defence Initiative is announced.

Combining elements of Conficker, Folding@Home, and old fashioned American wartime patriotic spirit, the CHDI allows allows ordinary citizens to do their part by dedicating spare cycles and bandwidth to protecting the networked home front and striking back at America’s enemies. A quick download and completely automatic installation makes contributing to the defence effort as easy as leaving you computer on and online when it’s not in use.

Whichever political party isn’t in power decries the CHDI as yet another infringement on American liberties, a governmental land grab, and a violation of privacy in hearth and home. The other side leverages their extensive social networking capabilities to build support for, and sign-ups to, the initiative. Department of Defence officials decline to comment on rumours that Blackwater’s cyber security division is renting time on the Nucrypt botnet.

It’s 30 minutes long, entertaining, and worth watching but in case you are pressed for time, here’s a summary:

• Ultra-casual games like FarmVille, Webkinz, Mafia Wars and Club Penguin took the industry by surprise and are making enormous amounts of money.
• Brian Reynolds should make a slot machine where if you win you get real money and if you lose, you get FarmVille money.
• People are starved for authenticity and links with the real world.
• Foursquare and other mobile apps seems like the next big thing.
• Sensors are becoming cheaper and cheaper and are heading towards ubiquity. (Spimes!)
• You think point programs and loyalty cards are a thing now? Wait until game designers get their hands on this stuff.
• Some examples where game designers have redesigned systems with a gaming bent (turning grades from scores into experience levels).
• An extended bit of design fiction where Schell imagines every action tracked and scored and how that might change our behaviour.

Prior art for a universal scoring system.

First thing: we already have a universal points system. It’s called money. Indeed, just about every example that Schell mentioned in his talk were systems by which we’d get points from corporations and governments that we could convert into money, discounts or tax credits, all of which are just money.

So what we’re actually talking about here is a ubiquitous micropayment system, which tracks your behaviour and rewards you accordingly. He’s talking about turning things into games by attaching a reward scheme to them.

Here’s the thing about Mafia Wars, FarmVille and all the rest. They’re objectively terrible games. They are incredibly tedious, repetitive activities gussied up with adorable (or lukewarmly bad-ass) graphics. There is little to no skill or strategy involved and the main path to advancement is to show up and click on things.

Indeed, the main profit centre for for FarmVille is giving players methods by which they can avoid playing the terrible game. You can either pay money to buy points that you can exchange for things that allow you avoid playing the terrible game, or you can look at advertisements you wouldn’t otherwise look at in order to get points that you can spend on things that allow you to avoid playing the terrible game.*

The lesson of these games is that a well-made reward scheme will get people to do all kinds of tedious fucking things. This really isn’t an exciting revelation. All those gambling addiction ads you see? Those are a consequence of the fact that a variable reward schedule will get some people to sit in front of a glowing box and press a single button over and over again until they run out of money. Casinos have this down to a science.**

Unbelievably comprehensive surveillance.

Back to the “ubiquitous” of Schell’s ubiquitous point scheme.

In computer games, the way that we can give you scores, points and achievements for the things that you do is that we know exactly what your avatar is doing at all times. Indeed the bulk of all hacking and cheating in games consists of giving the game bad information about where you are and what you are up to.

So what Schell is envisioning is a ubiquitous, perpetual, highly efficient surveillance society. Efficient to a degree that it orders of magnitude more effective than the worst fears about 1984. Is this plausible?

Well, on the one hand, people are already voluntarily giving out their locations to anyone who asks and voluntarily wear tracking devices so they can exchange bragging rights. On the other hand sometimes people are extremely reluctant to share. It’s a highly nuanced question, with very complex results.

If you can play it, you can cheat at it.

Let’s assume for a second that the right alchemy of incentives, fun, fad, and reassuring privacy policy can be found, and most of us choose to play. A lot of us are going to cheat.

We already do. We made the Game Genie a best-seller so that we could break our single player games. Every set of patch notes for every multiplayer game ever made includes changes made to close loopholes and code exploits that allow cheaters to teleport, fly, fire with perfect aim, and on and on. This is a constant battle waged over games where the gold, points, and scores have no real-world value whatsoever.

That’s just at the code level. There’s a social problem too. You can, right now, hire someone in China to play your game for you. These kinds of things are much, much harder to police and it’ll be much, much worse with real world games giving real world rewards.

Foursquare got their first taste of this when users started checking in from home. Their fix promptly ran afoul of mistaking legit check-ins for cheats. What happens when getting Foursquare points is valuable enough that it’s worth lending your phone or account login to a friend who bikes around the city collecting points for everyone in your crew? People will do it, that’s what happens. Did you hear about the US Dollar Coins exploit that gave infinite frequent flier miles? Ever considered cheating at Nike+? Here’s a guide for you.***

There are a lot of tools in the designer’s box.

The lesson here is one that economists have know for ages. Changing the incentive structure will change the way that people behave but it will rarely be in the way that you envision. People will poke at the problem and some of them will find the most efficient way to tackle it, and then they’ll post a strategy guide.

All that said, I’m pretty enthusiastic about turning the best parts of game design to the problems of the world. The promise of ubiquitous sensors that Schell mentions is that it will offer many new ways to make the invisible visible, to nudge us towards better habits and better behaviour. After all, what gets measured gets done, right?

But the emphasis in Schell’s talk on scoring systems – the bluntest, worst hammer in the game design toolbox – is the wrong approach. We already knew that we could get you to do things you didn’t want to do by offering a reward. It’s why we’re paying you to show up at work all the time.

I’m much, much more interested in using game design techniques to make the activities themselves more fun, engaging, and valuable. Instead of replicating FarmVille’s success at papering over a terrible gameplay experience with an effective reward scheme, what if we tried to replicate the successful mechanics of genuinely good games? Jonathan Blow examined this question much more eloquently in 2007.

Notes

*One might think that an easier way to avoid playing FarmVille would by to simply stop playing it. Well, I have a theory about that.

***We’ve hardly even started with the spime games and there are proto spime game hacking tools.