Will persuasive games dominate the economy

In my report of This Happened #5 I stated that the there was no excitement in connecting gaming as theme to interaction design. (…) “game principles are part of every good interaction, so that would be not fair and just confirmation of the quality of the designs” to quote myself.
But yesterday I saw the presentation of Jesse Schell on the future of persuasive gaming in our daily context. A great presentation that shows us that it can go even further. I think Jesse also wants to warn us on the effects and call to all of us to do good when implementing. And I think his future scenario will be far more subtle. You can think of this example as the new deeper principle in the economy where money is replaced with whuffie reputation currency.
Or is that to far fetched?…

For those who haven’t watched the presentation of Jesse yet, it is highly recommended.

You can say than money in a way is the game-point-system of the current economies. We take actions to maximize the possession by trying to increase earnings or minimize costs. You can see in theses principles game elements of course.

In the future scenario of Jesse the gaming is more prominent. As a layer on top of the existing economies, or even as replacement. It stimulates behavior. It would be interesting if this could be an extra system to stimulate change in behavior. If we want to go to more responsible use of our environment, where reputation is more important than heritage. This things are already happening in social systems of course. The reputation points in Twitter and the best example of course is Foursquare.

In the presentation of Jesse he ends with a scenario where the current objectives of our economy are supported with the persuasive gaming. I hope we can use these powerful change stimulating dynamics in order to leverage the need for a different approach in our economy.