“It is big, it is strange, it is unexpected.”

Schell spends the first six-and-a-half minutes of the lecture below talking about the surprising wins in technology this year.

Club Penguin, a flash game for kids, being bought by Disney for 350 million dollars.

Guitar Hero.

Webkins. “What?” “Really?”

He spends next 22 minutes trying to explain why these games have been so successful. Including:

Anything you spend time on, you start to believe, “This must be worthwhile. Why?  Because I’ve spent time on it.  And therefore it must be worth me kickin’ in 20 bucks because look at the I’ve spent time on it.  And now that I’ve kicked in 20 bucks, it MUST be valuable, because only an idiot would kick in 20 bucks if it wasn’t!”

What these all have in common is that these are all busting through to reality… We live in a bubble of fake bullshit and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.

Pockets turn the law of divergence inside out… remember the swiss army knife! …and this is why everyone hates the ipad.

And then, from about 21 minutes forward, he gives an account of what he thinks the future will look like. It’s, um, chilling.

Enjoy!

See also: Do We Play Farmville Because We’re Polite?

And also, he makes the same point we made in a previous post about how the new Ford Hybrid has made driving green into a game.

Via Text Relations.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.