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GDC Social Game Debate
March 7, 2011
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Now that I'm back from the Game Developers Conference, I'll post some summaries of my talks. Let's start with the Are social games legitimate? debate, which moderator Margaret Robertson quickly transformed into an "Are social games evil?" debate. I was clearly the only real detractor on the panel, and I'm happy to be able to adequately summarize my position with the following slide, which I showed during my opening remarks.

I explained it more thoroughly in the talk, but maybe I'll just let the argument stand in its visual format here. Gamasutra has more coverage of the session.

Comments (2)
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HI Ian,

In this case, I think the medium really is the message: its about getting an entire generation of youth conditioned into a surveillance society.
It's fun! Just a game, after all. That's probably the real reason the establishment is putting so much money into gaming culture.

And I would be very surprised if most of these cutting edge game theorists aren't actually literally decades behind military & financial intelligence when it comes to research into psychosocial impacts of game and simulation design.

I believe user-generated content is the future: completely other types of platforms, social games are possible, possibly inevitable. Maybe we'll get lucky and it'll spiral out of control...

Mr. Seacrudge on March 7, 2011 6:17 PM

I can dig it.

Neils Clark on March 8, 2011 4:10 AM
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