Wandering Wandering Star

… the fact that someone from outside of the traditional game-writing community calls bullshit on gamification is telling:

Instead of just bombarding us with jingles, corporations will be able to inject their messages directly into our minds with ads disguised as games.

Gamification seeks to turn the world into one giant chore chart covered with achievement stickers — the kind of thing parents design for their children — though it raises the potentially terrifying question of who the parents are.

This, I fear, is the dystopian future of stupid games: amoral corporations hiring teams of behavioral psychologists to laser-target our addiction cycles for profit.

“The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in tech. The bottleneck is really in art”-

I think what I’m going to talk about is the history of the relationship of artsy to techy people, and how I feel like it’s reversed over the last twenty years.

The artsiest people went into technology and it feels now like–especially when I go someplace like Rhizome and see these partnerships between technology people and arts people–that the arts people are the nerds. The technology people are the people coming up with wild ideas and going forward and building them and the arts people are the ones who say, “this is a sort of Schopenhauer-influenced post-modern blah, blah, blah.” They’re the ones creating the documentation and the historical framework around projects that are pure imagination.

So it looks to me like the nature of the partnerships between artists and technology people are the opposite of what they might have been back in the day, where the art boys were the crazy, wild people, pairing up with nerds to sort of envision this technological future. And now it’s wild-eyed technologists pairing up with educated, almost Ph.D-like artists, in order to contextualize what they’re doing more responsibly.