Our life as a game...

I don't know that this is necessarily a new thing per se, I imagine it has been growing in popularity over the last few years, but what really struck me today was how many Web 2.0 companies / applications are applying gaming principles to attract and retain users. It's both brilliant and bizarre at the same time. Our lives are now being turned into games... get points for:

• Eating at restaurants - Foursquare
• Watching TV shows - Gomiso
• Driving your car - Waze

This has been driven perhaps by a few things:

Zyngbook - Facebook and Zynga - these two behemoths of the social technology world were instrumental in bringing small time multi-player gaming into the mainstream

Pseudo-psychologists - There have been a number of pseudo-psychologists in the last decade or so that have hit it rich with best selling books that look at the irrationality of human psychology and behavior. I'm sure burried in their ramblings is something about how humans inherently love variable reward games and will play them repeatedly

Whatever the cause, it's still bizarre. While I admire the efforts of these companies from the standpoint of a savvy businessman, it pains me to see that so many people continue to wrap their lives up in what can only be described as noise. Facebook is of course the pinnacle of this... perhaps it's time people stopped playing their virtual lives and went out to get a real one.

1984