THEY GOT GAME

According to a new study conducted recently by Saatchi & Saatchi S entitled “Engagement Unleashed: Gamification for Business, Brands and Loyalty,” approximately half of working Americans are engaging in online social gaming during a typical work day. But more importantly, 55% of Americans want to work for a company that utilizes gamification to increase productivity.

The most surprising result is that younger Americans, (read as Lady Gaga fans) which is also one of the demographics more largely out of work these days, are willing to be paid less to work for a company that is socially-minded. Thus, social interaction and the workplace culture are becoming more important than more money these days - at least to some people - even with a struggling economy.

Well, naturally.

The people have spoken. They want their serfdom to be fun and engaging. Yet, it is an undeniably brilliant move by the beneficent overlords to mirror-shift the honor culture of achievement/merit/humiliation from money and actual tangible goods to game performance. Ludic merit means more for everybody. Nobody's self-esteem suffers.

THE DZIGA VERTOV SOFTWARE GROUP

a brief ramble about video games:

Their nature as timeholes is underexplored. There is something curiously subversive about an activity that allows a person to spend 50 hours a week in UNPRODUCTIVE TIME. We could even say that this is religious sacrifice in the Bataillean sense. It's unclear how much longer this pure & golden era can endure -- at some point, gamers will be put to WORK in some way.

I suspect that it will be in virtual surveillance of others.

The magic ingredient always missing in the classical Vertovian Surveillance State was a ludic component. If you can attach a scoring system to maintain Citizen Engagement along with the bread and circuses offered in the multi-player quantum universe a whole wealth of human behavior, complete with data mining is offered up to the State for its delectation.

Virtual serfdom is a pleasant way to disrupt revolutionary energy, offering everything! that the ever-increasing attrition of real qualities and wealth, so masterfully denied-in-the-world, as people are boiled alive and pauperized in risk bearing schemes for the sake of the very real masters of the universe.