Jesse Schell, Professor and CEO for game design, was Metanomic's end of season guest today.
His topic was turning the masses into game pods ripe for companies to scrape. What will they scrape data, money, Intellectual property, human rights etc. Truly the world is their oyster. And is this professor even thinking about ethics? No. What he is dreaming about is unending streams of funny money. Funny money that you and I will receive in payback for our lost rights. Yes, dear folks, in payback for you being turned into a walking commercial for Disney, Proctor & Gamble, Chase and so many others in lifestyle "games", they will give you a few cents worth of "game" money. In the past they would give you about 20 to 40 bucks for your input on their services. But now it won't cost them a penny anymore because you will be their "product game" monkey and you will dance for banana WoW gold.
In response to my comment about data scraping, Schell was flippant in stating that Google already scrapes with their gmail program. So the length of his ethical deliberation in all of this was...Google does it. So if Google does it, then its full steam ahead. He also stated that it was up to the people to either use or not use these "games/services". Because the companies are already so honest as to make clear what they do with our data. Their long and convoluted TOS policies are generally ignored by the public whose eyes glaze over when they see long blocks of text. Which the companies are counting upon.
You see, Schell is working on the California Business model. Which is to exploit any holes in the system until there is a mass uprising against underhanded practices. This is what occurred with the newspaper, film and music businesses. The technology companies scraped, scraped and scraped away using the populace as their cat's paw until the news and entertainment businesses started to fight for their IP. Now they have moved on to bigger pastures...us. And mind you, they will milk us dry for everything that is of any monetary value.
And if you don't think this is the case, watch the Metanomics program on their site. Schell was very adamant about the people having to cause a stink about this mass enslavement for "games" before any changes could or should be made. This coming from a PROFESSOR who teaches the younger generation. No doubt his professional connections to many companies and his own company also taint his ethical stance on these issues besides him just being rather blithely sociopathic.
Because when any person starts to see the cave of wealth and dreams (as Elaine Supkis calls it), it twists them. It starts them on the path to seeking the infinite. Which just as assuredly spikes upward then crashes to zero. This happened with the dot com bust. It occurred with the big data scrape heist (this war is still ongoing). VRs are just starting to go bust except for the big behemiths like WoW or games connected to behemiths like Facebook. And now the new bubble of customer data scrape and IP heisting of the little consumer will begin in earnest.
This of course will crash as well. And perhaps the current financial disaster will work in our favor. After all people cannot buy bread with WoW gold. Or sleep in virtual houses. Someone still has to pay the bills. Perhaps deep in the back of their lizard brains, Schell and his colleagues know these facts. But the tech industry is built on exploiting holes and ponzi financial schemes.
They are going to sell these pipe dreams to companies for all they are worth. Hopefully becoming infinitely rich in the process then pulling out to leave some jackass holding the bills.
And that jackass will be you and me, the game losers.
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2 comments:
I guess I didn't make myself clear during the interview. This new ground is very difficult and challenging ethical territory. By no means was I saying that these practices are ethical -- when I talked of Google, I wasn't saying "Google does it, therefore it is ethical", I was saying "If you think people won't sell out, you are wrong, they will, they are doing it now." I gave a talk at GDC this year about how game developers need to figure out where they stand on these ethical issues -- the slides can be found at www.slideshare.net/jesseschell, I hope to post the full talk soon.
No, you weren't clear Mr. Schell. Because many people received the impression from you that this new scrape idea was so new, no one has explored the implications yet or the ethical holes.
And they will make sure that the holes exist because then they can be exploited. It occurred in the financial industry and look at the mess there.
Which incidentally, is what your industry relies upon. A healthy economy filled with people with disposable income. That won't exist in a few years. Because industry has decided they are not responsible for ethical matters in their areas. They are like pacts of locusts that will eat and eat until collapse.
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