Via Om Malik at GigaOm: a fantastic video of a Dice 2010 presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell games and a former Disney Imagineer.

You should watch this for two reasons:

1. Schell is an incredible speaker.
2. He makes some very interesting points about how people engage with technology, namely that technology convergence is a myth. He adds that if real life were more like a game (do stuff and accrue points!), it would be easy to influence how people behave.

Given the success of socially networked games like FourSquare, I think Schell is pretty much right on.

In FourSquare, users “check in” to places like bars and theaters in order to earn badges, and the people with the most check-ins for a given location are anointed “mayor” of that place. Even though there aren’t necessarily real-world payoffs for this behavior, the players can get very competitive.

Where Schell’s hypothesis might fall apart is in the case of people like me: I’m not a gamer. I joined Dodgeball, FourSquare’s Google-owned precursor, but I failed to engage with it. I stopped checking in. I don’t play any other video games, either, so I doubt that Schell’s system of awarding points for behavior would hold much appeal for me.

It would be interesting to research the proportion of gamers to non-gamers in the general population. I wonder what the split is, percentage-wise, and which is more common? At what point does it make sense to apply a gaming metaphor in order to shape real-world behavior?