All right, for all my gripes about the Tofflers' Revolutionary Wealth being a bit short on revolutionary notions, here's something they tossed off on page 167 that whirled the gears in my head:
Vikram S. Kumar has been working with the Joslin Diabetes Center to design what he calls a "community-based, predictive game" for children with type I diabetes. DiaBetNet aims to develop mental models of their physiologies and motivate them to check their glucose levels more frequently. The game encourages diabetic kids, linked together wirelessly, to play on a computer to predict their own and others' glucose levels. The idea is to "leverage untapped social dynamics" rather than relying entirely on doctor-patient instructions or parental nagging.
Revolutionary Wealth - Alvin and Heidi Toffler
If you're interested in reading more, go here and here.
This false color picture of Lake Carnegie, Australia linked to from Pingnews.com's Flickr photostream. The picture by NASA is in the public domain.
You know about false-color imaging? Taking a picture of something but altering the colors to illustrate some invisible aspect of the thing? You can show how hot a place is, or wet, or how many minerals of what kinds are present where.
It's a simple and powerful trick. Map a more obvious or more appealing visual to a set of obscured data to expose the secret truth.
How many people play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games? Shared, communal game environments proliferate. So far, elements of gameplay and player's characteristics are tangentally, if at all, related to anything about their meatspace existence other than their discretionary cash.
But look what DiaBetNet is attempting, and imagine games where aspects of the players' actual lives, habits and activities, were tied in some measurable way to gameplay. There is alot of talk about a coming wave of home use medical diagnostic devices. How about games where your real world cholesterol level, heart rate, athletic ability, habitual diet, vitamin intake and drug use were directly related to in-game prowess or to active game-play through the uploaded diagnostic information?
A small step, the Wii Fit.
But I'm thinking of something more comprehensive... something that could aggregate and compare vital statistics and diagnostic results with a massive online population to spot trends and danger signs. Where catching early signs of cancer or the onset of alzheimers in other players leads to rewards and where the whole connected system learns from it's player-base as they use it to become more accurate, to incentivize improvements in healthy lifestyles, and to tell you when something is starting to go wrong, and point you to necessary resources.
But it can't be some square Surgeon General approved slab of government health propaganda.
The diagnostic activity has to be converted by "false-color" conversion to game play metaphors, that maybe have nothing to do with health in any obvious way. Maybe the players won't even fully know it. Optimize your diet to your body-type and age in the real world, and hidden levels of the game become available. Stop smoking, notice your experience points earned in raids are increased by some percentage. Do you have an in-game home territory? A castle maybe? The higher your risk of heart disease, the more rats in your castle.
The more of your (certified by some method like diagnostic devices or doctor transmitted information) medical history you make available to the game, the richer your experience. The game subtly and constantly evolves environmental challenges aimed at nudging players closer to their unique optimal health.
The game of life?
No comments:
Post a Comment