Here’s a fact for you. The average IQ of the human race is increasing and the rate of increase is increasing since the 1990’s. It’s called the Flynn Effect.
I just learned that because i watched this good TED talk about video games and gamification.
He talks about what actually makes people smarter and then argues that all the items that do can be found in games. Items such as:
He also talks about a guy in White Bear Lake MN who was a successful businessman. When his kids went to school, he was appalled at the education they were getting so he quit his job, got a masters in education, and took over an elementary school class. He then replaced the entire curriculum with a video game-based curriculum.
Did it work? Well, in 18 weeks his kids went from a below 3rd grade level to an above 4th grade level. In only 18 weeks. It was because games for them were fun and multiplayer.
This speaker, Gabe Zichermann, talks about this generation of millenials, 126 million of them, and how they use games as their primary means of entertainment. This has a profound effect on society, and you can see it in the dashboard of electric cars, in Nike’s website, and all over the place.
He tells the story of a guy in Sweden, Kevin, who made a traffic camera lottery system. Before Kevin, Sweden had a system where it takes a picture of your car if it’s going over the limit, then determines how much money the drivers make, and then issues tickets at higher prices to those who make more money and lower prices for those who make less money. Kevin re-engineered the system so it also takes a picture of those people who are driving under the speed limit and it enters them into a lottery – a lottery to win all the proceeds from the other tickets from people speeding. This is game-thinking where you take a negative reinforcement loop and turn it into a positive. It works. The average speed is now 20% less than it was before.
Corporations will also be doing it:
The speech is great. Thanks to Patrick for sending it my way. All of these facts point to a future that’s pretty different than it is today. Things are faster. There are rewards everywhere. There is a lot of collaboration. I’m actually looking forward to it.
