Andrew Hinton asks what we can learn about the future by looking at what the kids are doing. [I came in a few minutes late.]

71% of all teens are playing games online, he says. [I missed the scope — US teens?] . He goes through the impressive financial stats: We’re spending lots of money on these games. Wells Fargo built an island in Second Life.

Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces, Andrew says, and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. E.g., game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.

We need to give people not just maps but navigational tools because the environment is constantly changing. He points to Microsoft’s Wallop.

“Kids are going to be kings of all media,” he says. “Broadcasting is dying; it’s not going away but it’ll be a specialized thing…It’s a peer-to-peer world. And, please only give me authentic voices.” And community is important, he says, pointing to Warcraft as an example. Why doesn’t Photoshop’s help system send us to the communities of Photoshop experts, he asks.

MySpace takes all the stuff about high school — how many friends you have, for example — and makes it explicit.

Being able to make multiple selves — e.g., multiple profiles at Yahoo — is relationship diversification.

The virtual environment is spilling out into the real world. He talks about TATUS, a simulated virtual ubiquitous computing environment. “This is freaky. This is Postmodern to the nth degree. we’re studying virtual reality to study reality.” He also refers to the “I love Bees” marketing campaign to launch Halo 2 that engrossed the user community.

Andrew calls “the game layer” the merging of the physical and digital realities. “This is going to make our real lives more like game lives, because we’re going to be immersed in data.”

[Great talk. I haven’t done justice to it or its playfulness.] [Tags: iasummit andrew_hinton games]

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