About this item
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation - and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You've Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties.
About the Author
Hi! I'm author of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, and CEO at Six to Start, an award-winning games company and co-creators of "Zombies, Run!"Originally, I trained as a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, and went on to conduct research at UCSD and at the University of Oxford. Just as I was starting a PhD in neuroscience at Oxford, I left to become Director of Play at Mind Candy, working as the lead designer of the Perplex City alternate reality game. In 2007, I co-founded Six to Start and also become an occasional technology writer for The Telegraph. Over the last few years, I've had work displayed at MOMA and the Design Museum; conducted research in a Mars simulation in the Utah desert; worked with Disney Imagineering, Death Cab for Cutie, the British Museum, and The Economist; and spoken at TED in Monterey, California.When it comes to inspiration, I owe a debt of gratitude to Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Hyde, Ted Chiang, George Orwell, Stanislaw Lem, and many more. Without their stories and ideas, the future would be a darker place.
