TED notes: Kevin Kelly on the internet and Tom Chatfield on video games

Kevin Kelly, the next 5000 days of the web

• the internet is only 5000 days old, what will the next 5000 days look like?
• “it’s amazing, and we’re not amazed”
• we’re basically creating one giant machine, and it’s the strongest/most reliable machine we’ve ever built
• all our machines are portals into the one machine (every smartphone, every laptop, every IoT)
• 3 changes: embodiment, re-structuring, co-dependence
  • copies have no value
  • attention is currency
• humans are the machine’s extended senses
• we’re linking data; first the connections were machine to machine, then page to page, now data to data
• we shouldn’t need to port our friends to each social network, the web should just know
• “to share will be to gain”
• no bits will live outside the web — early version of software eating the world

* * * * *

Tom Chatfield: 7 ways video games engage the brain

• it’s amazing that people spend $8B on virtual goods
• Farmville has 70M players (talk is from 2010)
• games provide rewards, both individual and collective
• all about ambition + delight
• in video games you can measure everything — big data
• there’s always a “reward schedule”
• 7 ways to use game lessons in real world
  1. have experience bars to measure progress
  2. set multiple long and short-term aims
  3. they reward effort — get credit for every bit of work/effort
  4. provide rapid, frequent, clear feedback
  5. have element of uncertainty — variable rewards, dopamine
  6. offer windows of enhanced attention
  7. add other people! social, cooperation

Here’s a running list of TED talks and notes (it’s a long page so it could take a few seconds to load).