Newer posts are loading.
You are at the newest post.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
September 26 2011
The Onion -- California To Allow Prisoners To Serve Sentences Online
'Faced with a mandate to cut the state's prison population by 30,000, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Monday it would begin allowing prisoners to serve their sentences online. "Inmates are required to log in promptly every morning at 6 a.m.," CDCR secretary Matthew Cate said. "But make no mistake, this is not some online holiday resort prison. Offenders spend at least eight hours a day entering data and can only see visitors in the chat room once a week.'August 23 2011
Vimeo -- BitHunt
'BitHunt is an augmented reality treasure hunt for bitcoins.'
'BitHunt is an augmented reality treasure hunt for bitcoins.'
March 18 2011
Onion News Network -- CIA's "Facebook" Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs
'The CIA's invention of Facebook has saved the government millions of dollars.'February 19 2011
HIPSTER RUNOFF -- Mark Zuckerbro has illuminati meeting with Barry Obama and Steve Jobs
'Maybe Zuckerbro has some ideas for a new age democracy where every1 just votes on issues utilizing facebook, and we don't need Congress any more, and Zuckerbro can just ride dictator waves/rig some votes. Is 'technology'/'the internet' really a big deal that deserves national attention, or just another 'fad' that will be outdated 1 day? Are tech CEOs just 'legalized dictators'? Is Mark Zuckerbro trying 2 hard 2 be famous and control the world? It seems like this was some sort of modern illuminati meeting, with every1 who controls the world (because the world = 'the internet') Seems like this was probably some sort of huge meeting to 'control the future of the world.' Here they are toasting to 'enslaving' ppl with less than 100 friends on Facebook and making them do 'data entry enslavement' 4 the rest of time.'January 26 2011
YouTube -- RT: 'Virtual goods! Virtual currency! Virtual output!'
The computer finds its own use for things?
The computer finds its own use for things?
RWW -- Your Facebook Activity is Now an Ad
'Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application. With Facebook's Sponsored Stories, your activity is now up for grabs, available to the advertiser associated with the brand, business or app you interacted with. Just checked in to a restaurant? That's an ad. Just liked a brand? That's an ad. Just shared a news story from the Web? That's an ad. -- ...it's unclear what level of control advertisers have here. It's important though, because real personalized recommendations work both ways - they deliver the good news and the bad. Without both sides represented, this is just a new way to spam your friends.'September 07 2010
Wired -- Alt Text: Make a Nasty World Nice With Virtual Rewards
'‘Get Yourself Paid!’ From McDonald’s and Blizzard. You know what sucks? Poverty. And yet, billions of people still seem to lack the motivation to stop being poor. What if they’re just waiting for the right incentive? Well, now they have it: If you manage to creep above the poverty line you’ll be awarded a fancy hat for all your World of Warcraft characters. As an added incentive, if you make more than $250,000 a year you get an exclusive epic flying mount in the shape of a private charter jet! You can bet people will be leveling up their paychecks in no time.'August 07 2010
RWW -- Google CEO Schmidt: "People Aren't Ready for the Technology Revolution"
'On the misuse of information for criminal or anti-social purposes: "The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it."' (We'll work with the anti-social criminals calling themselves "the government" to make sure you can never escape.) -- '"People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them." "...society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content."' (People won't know how to cope when they realise they've sold themselves into slavery via our 'free' services, so they'll naturally repress the horror and instead look to us as saviours. We shall oblige by talking religious mumbo-jumbo about terabytes and distruptions. And we shall offer servitude in perpetual open vs closed data wars to give people meaning and a reason to live.)July 21 2010
June 25 2010
LA Times -- California welfare cards can be used in many casino ATMs
'The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found. State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards. -- Faye Stearns, a part-owner of Casino Royale, said she had no idea people on welfare could withdraw taxpayer dollars from the machine, and would not oppose a measure to prohibit it. "I'm sure we wouldn't want to be taking money from children," Stearns said. "The adults? Hey, that's their problem. But kids? No."''May 25 2010
7 Eleven Buy. Earn. Play. (Zynga Collab)
'7-Eleven has teamed up with your favorite Zynga games to offer tons of exclusive gifts with purchase for players of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and YoVille. You can find participating products throughout your local 7-Eleven store. Purchase these products to grow your farm, strengthen your mafia and deck out your virtual world in YoVille. Plus, the right purchases will help you earn 200 Farm Cash, 50 skill points in Mafia Wars and a Slurpee machine for your house in YoVille.' -- Reverse it for game-earned foodstamps. It's only a matter of time.March 05 2010
HuffPost -- Couple Let Baby Starve To Death While Raising Virtual Baby Online
'Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and Choi Mi-sun, 25, would feed their three-month-old baby only when not at 12-hour-online sessions in a local internet café. The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter. After one such session in September the couple found their daughter dead and called police. An autopsy found the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. "It seems that taking care of their on-line game character erased any sense of guilt they may have had for neglecting their daughter."' -- Push button parenting.March 02 2010
Generation Bubble -- Limited Inc.: A Jobless Future and the Narcissist Economy
'Society needs people to elaborate the rituals, to espouse the markers, to prove them in the public process of consumption. As the process accelerates, this becomes more and more difficult and time-consuming to keep up with. Enter Web 2.0, a real-time trend tracker and data harvester, and enter the newly “unemployable” youth leisure class, which may actually be busily working on reproducing the ideology of consumerism online. When a self-conscious group of hyperconsumers take to the internet to chart their retail course among friends and stake out their identity, they are simultaneously working as cultural functionaries, taming the promiscuous field of goods, doing the grunt work in developing the marking services that help the haute-consumer classes perfect its privilege. They secure the appropriate set of meanings to preserve the status of the class to which they have pretensions of belonging.'February 28 2010
Sirlin -- External Rewards and Jesse Schell's Amazing Lecture
'The unspoken premise of his DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery... people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given. He muses about a (dystopian?) future where games with external rewards permeate every minute of our lives. He looks at the beginnings of that in our current world and extrapolates out an extreme future where this stuff has completely taken over. What will stop it from taking over? Nothing, of course. Humanity has thoroughly proven that it can be manipulated by hollow external reward systems, and so these systems will take over.'G4tv.com -- DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos
"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.
Tags:
* thegamingofeverydaylife hyperreality gaming psychology collecting loyalty performance incentives achievements rewards experiencepoints numbers nudge surveillance sousveillance socialengineering ludotopianism ludocapitalism conformity bravenewworld idiocracy attention advertising grinding subsistenceclicking theadvertisedlife
February 24 2010
Newsweek.com -- The Internet Creates a New Kind of Sweatshop
'People can also be enlisted to do work without any idea for whom they're working or why. You might synthesize a new chemical that winds up being used as a poison or in a bomb. Iran's leaders could ask Turkers to cross-reference the faces of the nation's 72 million citizens with those of photographed demonstrators. -- If labor can be summoned and directed from afar, fewer and fewer interactions will remain untainted by those seeking to influence their outcomes. I see a park of the future, its visitors staring into small screens, clicking or talking away. One puts the finishing touches on a $10,000 challenge answer. Another casually asks three friends to see a movie with him that evening, not because he wants to, but because he'll earn a $10 commission. A third is picking up a penny for counting how many others are there, not sure why or to whom it matters. We might miss the days when we went to the park just to have fun.'TechCrunch -- Hollywood Stock Exchange Is Becoming A Real Money Exchange In April. Seriously.
'Investors wishing to participate in the exchange will buy “contracts” priced at one one-millionth of a film’s projected boxoffice... Everyone starts with 10,000 “virtual dollars” in a Cantor Exchange practice account, and at the end of the practice period Cantor Exchange will convert each 1,000 virtual dollars of profit you earn into $10 cash and deposit it into your real-money trading account (maximum $100 per trader). So if you earn 10,000 virtual dollars in profit while practicing on Cantor Exchange, you get $100! There is no cost to participate in this program.'February 19 2010
Raph’s Website -- Gameifying everything
'Some will find this questionable on the grounds of who sets up the incentive structures... Others will see it as a big invasion of privacy... Yet another group will worry about the fact that the incentive structures here are likely to be based on psychological hacks and reinforcement tricks. -- ...we need to be thinking about what our accommodation is with these technologies and approaches. Almost all of this arises simply out of better knowledge of ourselves and our psychology paired with improvements in communications technology. And that is not a new problem—it’s an old one. Spotting [(manipulation)] has become a cottage industry, from Photoshop fails to political fact-checking. And we shouldn’t by any stretch think that games or game tactics are the only place where this stuff will be used or even most impinge upon our lives. ...the concerns that arise from gameifying the world apply in larger measure to non-games.'VentureBeat -- How social games terrify traditional game makers but will lead us to gaming everywhere
'Where is this going? Schell says that the achievements and incentives that have wired us into playing Facebook games compulsively will soon be built into everything. Your toothbrush, for instance, will give you 10 achievement points for brushing your teeth in the morning, Schell said. Then it will give you more points for brushing for the right amount of time. Then it will give you points for brushing every morning in a week. You may also get credit for eating your Corn Flakes. If you take the bus to work, your local government will give you 10 achievement points for reducing traffic. You will get credit for walking to work, as your digital shoes will testify. If you kid gets straight A’s on a report card, he or she will get 2000 points. And the Obama administration will give you 5,000 points for being a good parent. These things are going to make Facebook games seem tiny and just the beginning of a giant wave of game-ification of the world.' -- In Soviet Russia, game plays YOU.
Older posts are this way
If this message doesn't go away, click anywhere on the page to continue loading posts.
Could not load more posts
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
Just a second, loading more posts...
You've reached the end.
Guardian -- Roy Greenslade: US newspaper to charge website commenters
'From tomorrow, the Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address. And the name on the credit card will be the name that will appear on comments. So it's goodbye to anonymity. At the same time, the poster must acknowledge that he/she will abide by US state and federal law and agree to be legally responsible for any content he/she posts.'