Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Jesse Schell is a professor at the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center, and the CEO of Schell Games. He wrote a book called "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" and has been involved with several innovative research projects involving mobile games. He is currently working on a few new mobile games at his studio.

In your talk at DICE, you call the iPhone a "modern digital Swiss Army Knife." Yet we see the iPad and an ecosystem of screens. What are your thoughts on the current state of convergence and how will this affect the way games are designed?

Convergence is mostly a myth. Technologies generally do not converge, they diverge. That's why it will not be strange for people to have a game console, a laptop, an iPad, and a smartphone. The number of screens in our lives will continue to increase. The cool part about this for games is that it gives us all kinds of new ways and places to create games.

As an expert on game design, you are able to see through the hype. What are Foursquare's current flaws? What about EpicWin? Will turning our to-do list into a game actually work?

Anyone curious about this should read the book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Turning our to-do lists into games only works in very limited situations, and generally only for a short time -- soon, we get sick of it, and it doesn't seem fun anymore, it just seems like work.

As for Foursquare, its main flaw is that it provides little actual value right now -- it is primarily a novelty, like the Tamagotchi was. Once the world understands a novelty, the world moves on. Now, some people say, "well, soon they will add fantasy elements -- the whole world will become an RPG." But you know what? Foursquare + Fantasy = Larping. And I think you know how the world feels about larping.

Foursquare's future path most likely lies in advergaming. They will cut deal after deal with companies that are trying to make a splash with some novel new Foursquare game that has products for prizes, and it will be great fun, until the world gets bored of it. I know I sound negative, but that's just my gut reaction. Maybe the Foursquare guys will figure out something clever and find a way to become an essential part of our everyday lives -- but right now I don't see it.

We recently took note of this commentary on gaming in an Adweek Digital Special Issue:

Nicholas Christakis calls the defining paradigm of the digital age: "massive, passive data collection." Simply put, with technology invading all parts of our lives, we're leaving digital footprints of our activities. Combine that data trail with an increasingly robust social graph and what results is the ability to visualize behavior patterns -- eating, sleeping, walking and driving -- and make a competitive game out of them.

It reminds us of  the idea of earning points by brushing our teeth. What opportunities do you think lie here? Will we tire or burnout from all of these point systems? Are there alternatives?

It's all about the game design. Bad designs will wear us out, good ones will spur us to challenge ourselves. In the coming decade there will be thousands of experimental examples -- some big, some small. Most will fail -- but a few will succeed -- and their success will be because they have found a way to enrich our daily lives in a way that wasn't possible before.

Finally, what are a couple of things you have your eyes on in the mobile and tech space? What have you been thinking about?

I've been thinking a lot about augmented reality. I've been thinking about how very soon all the scattered data about us on the web will be consolidated in ways that will shock us. Someone will hold their smartphone up as they walk by my car, my house, or my person, and suddenly get information about my life, my interests, and my family. This is going to make us feel like our privacy has been violated, even though no new data is being shared -- rather, the old data that is already out there on Facebook and on the web is going to be consolidated in unexpected ways. We'll be like Adam and Eve biting the apple, and suddenly realizing that we're naked.

That, and I've been thinking about using GPS to play pac-man while I drive!