We Are All Fuddy-Duddies, But Everything Is Compelling

I've covered the virtual worlds industry for two years. It's a youth-driven medium. (28% of kids 3-11 who use the Internet visited a virtual world at least once a month over 2008.) It's also very much a medium that's like the MMOs Avi talked about: users group together, chat, play casual games or solve mysteries, or just pretend that they're playing games in the virtual world. (One of my favorite stories is of users in Habbo, a popular world, banding together to create pretend jobs at a virtual diner. There were no actual virtual burgers served, no virtual currencies exchanged, just imagination.)

Marketers don't call this a game because girls (a key demographic) don't play "games."

My point is that while Avi's calling out the shared fantasies of games as one of their most compelling points, I think it's the shared fantasy of any social space that makes it not just compelling, but a game. E.g., Facebook is a game, eBay is a game, and, most explicitly, Flickr is a game. I.e., World of Warcraft isn't compelling as a game because it's shared, it's a game because it's a shared, compelling experience.

As a species, we are game players. Johan Huizinga called us "Homo Ludens," or "Man the Player," in a book of the same name way back in 1955. It's just getting more explicit now.

As Avi pointed out, for most people our age, video games have been a part of our lives since childhood. My folks didn't let me have a console until I could buy my own, but I spent plenty of time playing Mario at my friends' house across the street. I got my first job for two reasons: first (in theory) to pay for debate tournaments and second (realistically) to pay for a PlayStation.

I am now what's politely known as an outlier. More directly, says the Pew Internet & American Life Project, I'm old.

Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories. [emphasis mine]

You want hard numbers? Fully 97% of American kids aged 12-17 play games on the computer, Web, portable devices, or consoles. 50% played "yesterday." 86% play on a console. And, the part that really blows me away, only 48% use a cell phone or organizer to play games.

I remember as a nerd in high school thinking that once all the cool kids started playing Snake on their new cell phones, they'd embrace me as a leader. The casual, handheld devices that were ostensibly for communication were more and more often being used for gaming. That held true for a while and maybe still holds true for our generation and those a few notches older than us.

We're not only biologically predisposed to think of things as a game. We're now culturally trained to transform our social experiences into games. If there's interaction (I do x thing and get y result), reward (y result gets me z benefit), and shared results (z benefit gains me recognition among my favorite group), it starts to feel a lot more like Mario and World of Warcraft than just hanging out online.

I'm not sure what all the effects will be, but they're already on the tipping point of pervasive. I do think we'll need a new vocabulary (or I read to need more game scholarship) to talk about different types of games and social experiences.