Sebastian Deterding: Ruling the World: When Life Gets Gamed

"Reality is broken – let's make it a game!" Thus sounds the battle cry of marketers and designers pushing the notion of "gamification". Health, education, civic participation, green living: Nothing that couldn't be fixed (and made more fun) by layering some game elements over it. In this, gamification takes the logical next step in our algorithm-shaped, "robot-readable" world, a world where ever more of our everyday actions are tracked, stored, processed, and decided upon by computers on the other side of the interaction – from regulating traffic speed to alarming the nurse next door, from high-speed trading to withdrawing cash at our local ATM. What if we would design these systems not just to keep our society running, but actively steer it? Indeed, what if? That is the question this talk tackles: What happens if we make some rules, let computer execute them, and then put some humans inside?