Love this video. The beginning part where Jesse talks about evaluating what happened with the surprising popularity of certain new games is pretty close to the exact thought process that led us to start Loyalese. If his vision for the future is accurate, we could be on the right track…

I think it's scary, IMHO our kids will be converted in bots with this kind of marketing army against them. Pinocchio will be more human than human beings.

aaargh – curses to you all!

Just when I think I've finally got my tiny little head wrapped around all of these newfangled ideas, somebody tries to stretch my brain a little further. Now how am I supposed to sleep at night? My 'possible things I could do' list just grew exponentially, and my 'percentage of those things that I just don't have time to do' ratio is also getting worse by the minute

Thanks to Jesse Schell for the wonderful thoughts, and thanks to Brad for sharing . . .

Cool video, Brad. Thanks.

I agree with Jesse that everything will be tracked. I've discussed this in the past — that while the concept of everything we do being recorded (online and off) is scary, the benefits of agreeing to participate in this sort of system will be significant enough that people volunteer (in part because smart people will work on safeguards to minimize the scary-factor). Whether it's rewards and incentives or just a highly personalized and enhanced software experience, the people who opt in to the data sharing agreement will benefit greatly (as will the businesses that will gladly fund the whole thing).

I disagree with him about the game premise, though. I don't think it'll be a big massive points system that people view as a bunch of individual games. I'm a competitive guy, but I just don't think that's the theme that will stick long-term. I think it'll be more pervasive and less "in your face" day-to-day. I use apps like RunKeeper and Gowalla not for the "game" aspect of them, but because I feel like I benefit from the tracking of data. I'm confident that over time, the way I interact with businesses will be enhanced because of products like Gowalla (for example).

I guess if you consider things like rewards points for a credit card to be a game, he could be on the right track. I do think that behaviors will change significantly (and generally for the better) as behaviors are increasingly tracked (they already are, opt-in or not), but the idea of throwing out high fives just for a couple of extra rewards points …. I don't see it.