"You'd be completely shocked at the things we can convince people do with a vacuum cleaner."
Gamastura ran a contest late last month to predict the future of games. Dubbed "Games of 2020," the contest asked entrants to "imagine what video games might be like in the year 2020." Winners would receive an all-access pass to the forthcoming Game Developers Conference. The results are in, among them a massively multiplayer origami game and a full-body massage game. I am grateful to have been provisionally immortalized in one of the entries, Appliance Gaming 2020, offered by Daniel Cook of Lost Garden.
The massive success of WiiFit was a wakeup call, not for the game industry, but for Maytag and Whirlpool. With a dash of simple game design, a simple bathroom scale outsold the most popular bathroom scales in the history of mankind by an order of magnitude. A cadre of lapsed game developers, reinvigorated by their new 40-hour a week jobs, saw the obvious business opportunity and leapt for it. The resulting product: cloud connected household appliances combined with simple games and an augmented reality feedback system.
You have to read to the end to get the context for the lovely image below.
Ian Bogost, Senior Vice President of the Hoover Games and Consumables division was caught on government spyeye commenting. "Given the correct reward system, you'd be completely shocked at the things we can convince people do with a vacuum cleaner. Why coerce when you can persuade?" His lunch companion, Sir Miyamoto laughed knowingly. Then they both hopped onto a co-op WiiBike and sped off on a tour of the Los Angeles Crater.
Thanks, Daniel, for starting my week with a good chortle.
(crossposted from bogost.com)
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