Lately it has been hard for me not to see recent trends ranging from gamification to the increasing prevalence of robots in the household as a sign of the way the real world is starting to imitate a virtual world.
- We’re adding friends lists via well, everything
- And bots via robots
- and reputations via LinkedIn
- and auction houses via eBay
- and secure trade via Craigslist
- and profiles via Facebook
- and virtual currency with Facebook Credits
- and quests via serious games
- and points for meaningless grinding via gamification
- and strategy guides via Quora
- and guild chat via status updates
- And stats to ourselves via ‘quantified self’ approaches
- And classes and skills via the march of specialization in job roles
Now, you may say that all of these are things that existed before. Yes, and we then built adapted versions of them for the virtual world that accommodated the fact that they were being simulated in a virtual space. And now those adaptations are being ported back to meatspace. We could call these three stages of development:
- real world, inhabited by people
- virtual world, inhabited by users
- wold virtual inhabited by userplayers
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