You’re driving to work. (Yes, sadly this is in your future.) The SO calls (this may or may not be in your future) to remind you to pick up a quart of milk on your way home. The phone is actually built into your car, hands-free, with a mike in the steering wheel. She can send the address of the store, and the location will pop up on you car’s GPS minimap along with an alarm that will ring you when you start your evening commute.

Just then some asshole cuts you off without signaling. You brake, and simultaneously hit the “fuck you buddy” button, which is situated comfortably between the sunroof and cruise controls. The button lights up whenever your car’s camera and proximity sensors detect that you’ve been cut off. It’s doubly irritating because these same sensors in asshole’s car should have informed him not to switch lanes, and he clearly ignored them for the sake of a 4 second time gain.

Once pressed, the button uploads to the auto maker’s server, and outputs via a variety of third-party applications to your Facebook, Twitter, and Live accounts. Driverscores are displayed on Live, accessible to everyone on the network; your car’s HUD informs you that this guy is a natural griefer, and your thumbs-down will be added to his growing list of poor reviews. Good driving, proper signaling, and sticking to the speed limit are all strategies for building a higher driverscore, which can result in bonuses and cheaper DMV fees.



The HUD system in your car’s windshield can display other drivers’ names, driverscores, and statistics reactively, as the car’s internal cameras track where your eye is focusing, and match it to the positional data of the surrounding vehicles. Moreover, when you turn on the “assistance” feature, then it will help to guide you to proper driving with proper incentives. Virtual pickups will appear in areas where you should go, granting you points for making your turns and lane changes in the right places – in addition, lights on the corresponding controls in your car will illuminate when a recommended maneuver occurs – the speedometer will show what the recommended speed is, and will grant you a bonus for maintaining it.



Operating from satellite data, the car’s computer knows where you should position your car in order to reduce traffic congestion and accidents, and the better you react to its instructions, the more points you receive. Chaining together correct maneuvers and combos can enable you to unlock other incentives, like free smog checks or HUD skins – for those who want to drive to work in space, weaving in and out between lanes of gargoyles, dodging potholes that look like banana peels or green shells. As people tag more transitory features, like potholes and deep puddles, the data improves. It turns out all we needed to make people drive better is trophy support for our actual cars. Who knew?



Arriving at work, you breeze past the receptionist whose name and face you can never remember. It doesn’t help that she changes them every week or so. A light web of holographic tattoos crisscrosses her face invisibly, projecting new temporary tribal designs or tweaking her features each time she updates her live Avatar and screenname. In the bigger cities, given names have fallen into the same layer of personal information as social security numbers – good for identification on forms, but when you actually refer to someone, you go by their current screen name if you want them to respond to you.



You reach your desk, and as you get in range of the webcam at your station, Outlook clicks to life. You have eight active quests (which at the turn of the century were still being called “tasks”). You need to finish three of them today in order to keep your performance meter above 80%, which is what you need in order to score a bonus at the end of the quarter. If you finish five tasks, you’ll score a combo bonus, which will net you a Starbucks gift card if you do it enough times. If you finish all tasks, you’ll gain an experience level, which comes with the ability to add another active task to your queue, and one perk you’ve been waiting for, the ability to delegate one additional task to someone else while still receiving a percentage of their completion credit. You’re convinced that, given enough time, you can arrange this system so that you can level while doing whatever the hell you want. But enough musing; the clock is ticking, and it’s time to get to work.

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As game fans, we spend a lot of time thinking about games, playing them, talking about them, and comparing them – and with each passing year, more and more people pick up a controller or a mouse and keyboard to become gamers. But, if you look around, you’ll see not only more games and more gamers, but more places where game technology is influencing how we live and behave. Game-like systems of incentivization are showing up all around us – and if you’ve spent a lot of time gaming, you’ll have a better natural understanding of how to make these systems work for you, now and in the future. But just be careful; if you don’t stay on your toes and stay well-informed, you’re going to find these systems playing you, instead of the other way around.