Welcome gamers and players.

I’m having an interesting conversation by e-mail with Roman Rackwitz, that gives me opportunity to write about something I think since very long time. The topic is about the future, and how we will live and work in a (not so) far future.

So, let me to be very clear and, for a moment, completely honest: why the hell are we living as we do? In most country of the Western World we have won the challenge against history. Famine, cold and disease those tormented our ancestor is almost forgotten. We have won.
So, why do we stress so much ourselves about “working”? Our job should appear, to the eyes of a man who lived in past centuries brought today, as no more than games.
How can a Medieval farmer otherwise define a job which ask you to sit down in a warm room, with all beverage, toilet and food you want, typing on a keyboard?

Now our technologies also makes possible for a single farmer to produce enough for survival of an entire city (or something like that). Also, the broken sustainability of human activities suggest that we have to reconsider the reason why we work: in the future, some kind of resources and consumer goods will simply not be available as today, because there will be not enough for anyone.

I see Gamification as a key to drive behaviour to next step of this evolution: we don’t need to “work” to create value or make the world a better place to live. We can be productive and useful to society in our private and personal life, in our hobbies, in our interest, without anyone who have to pay us for that. Also, having fun while we do it! When we understand how to calculate the true value of all our time (in term of relationship, knowledge, empathy) , the word “job” will be substituted by “life”.

In many Western countries, this is happening right now. I saw, in the recent years, a growing number of person dedicating a big amount of time to others, being volunteers or donating (which is, for me, the same thing: work transforms time of your life in an expendable good: money).

This vision, however, requires that anyone can freely access to a minimum (or decent) lifestyle, regardless of money, work and everything else. Probably this will not happen until we all realize that we can’t employ anyone at work, with a constantly increasing productivity, a constantly increasing population and a fixed amount of space and resources.
Sooner or later, we’ll have to live with less, having more time for what we like, and making the world better outside our workplace.

I liked this perspective. This is why I keep this blog. Hoping that someone, somewhere, will slowly keep this revolution in motion.