The Game Layer: From Connections to Influence

Extracted 17JUN2012 from http://sxsw.com/node/6999

Seth Priebatsch is nothing if not ambitious. This was made obvious by the 22-year-old founder of SCVNGR'sclaim that he could solve, among other things, the issue of global warming in his SXSW Interactive keynote presentation. In one of the most compelling talks SXSW has seen, Priebatsch explained to the packed 2,000 seat ballroom that game mechanics could be used to influence behaviors in the real world and thus leveraged for good.

As Priebatsch expounded: the last decade was the decade of social, it was spent digitizing our connections and putting them online. This social layer has been built and we know it as Facebook and open graph API. With that in place, Priebatsch hopes to build upon this layer and usher in the next decade, the decade of games.

As he sees it, because this game layer traffics in influence and seeks to act on individuals’ motivations, it has the potential to be 10x larger than the social layer. More importantly, as this game layer is still being constructed, we have the opportunity to decide how we want it to be built and what we want it to do. 

See also from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the...