Turning Life Into a Game

Saker and Evans' article examining the impact of an application such as Foresquare or Dodgeball on human interaction with what is broadly referred to as "space", regarding essentially our environment, provides an interesting starting point for examining the use of wider social media.

Concerning Dodgeball, Nicole Lee writes in engadget: "Dodgeball, the predecessor to Foursquare that founder Dennis Crowley created in 2000 with fellow NYU student Alex Rainert. Born from the frustration of not knowing where people were partying, Dodgeball was a fairly basic service. Simply text your location to a city-specific Dodgeball email address (say, sf@dodgeball.com or ny@dodgeball.com), and friends would instantly be alerted to where you were as long as they were signed up to the service as well. Crowley called it the "Friendster for cellphones." (2014)

Foursquare, which is still operational, describes itself as: "Foursquare City Guide will lead you to the perfect spot -- anywhere in the world. Get helpful, positive tips from our trusted global community and keep track of where you you've been and where you want to go, all in one place." (2019)

As the article being discussed here explains, the idea of these two apps is to motivate people to visit physical spaces via digital immersion, predicated on goals situated within the realm of social media. 

Interestingly, this piece was published in 2016 and doesn't mention Pokemon GO, which as a phenomenon was credited with doing a similar thing: bringing those who may not typically leave their house out using success in a digital space as a motivator. Unsurprisingly, Dodgeball is dead and Pokemon GO is all but the same.

What I personally took away from this discussion is that whilst these games might be dead, the principle idea behind them has managed to infiltrate common social media use. Foursquare, mainly, is built on "check-ins", and subsequent rewarding of using check-ins, playing into the naturally competitive nature of people. Modern social media usage still incorporates check-ins heavily as part of its general use, without the explicit play component. 

While these games may have succeeded, in a sense, in bringing people out to new places, firstly I could be said this still wasn't for the right reasons- as one could argue that visiting new places because you want to win the 'most new places' contest isn't exactly the point of doing so, nor is it super healthy (see Pokemon GO). Secondly, check-in culture, which has somewhat birthed what we could Instagram culture, is all about being seen somewhere rather than engaging with it; tying in nicely to the over-arching issue with a lot of social media behaviour rooted in the idea of insincerity.

If everything we do is part of a digital contest based in being "seen" places rather than engaging with them, I feel this may continue to lead to a somewhat meaningless and hollow social landscape.