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SXSW Interactive Day 2 Why Well All Be Playing Games Soon

At SXSW Interactive, you’re occasionally going to run into this profile: 22-year-old CEO of company, dropped out of Princeton after a year, has given himself the title “Chief Ninja.” And, yes, those of us whose corporate backgrounds include pre-Zuckerbergian strata have to resist the urge to eyeroll when faced with such a profile.
And yet, one person with that profile — SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch — delivered a fascinating keynote speech on Day 2 of SXSW 2011 on Saturday afternoon. So fascinating, in fact, that the typically cynical SXSWi crowd, known to tweet that cynicism in a richly-entertaining way that pretty much necessitates using a keynote’s Twitter stream as color commentary, was downright bubbly.
While much of the commentary was focused on Priebatsch’s youthful exuberance and general marveling over his age and dropout status, the substance of his talk is really what’s worth focusing on, because it signals a trend in online engagement that could have widespread market impact.
The keynote, titled “The Game Layer on Top of the World,” noted that the past decade of interactive work has been dedicated to building a social network that allows us to connect to one another, and notes that this work is now basically completed. The next decade, in his view, will be dedicated to the game layer, which will build upon that social network, and give us the potential to meet a number of issues head-on — including issues that have indeed been created by the formation of that social network.
He organized his talk by addressing five core issues and how they fit within the worldview of someone consumed with how games work, why we play games and what elements keep us coming back to games. The issues: school, customer acquisition, loyalty, bringing location-based services (such as Foursquare and Gowalla) to the mainstream, and global warming. (The last one, though obviously big, was a more illustrative than literal point, but revealed at the end of the speech to be not entirely untenable.)
The school section felt the most fleshed-out of all five points, and Priebatsch’s views were a fascinating look into our education system from the view of a game designer.
School is, in Priebatsch’s view, a nearly-perfect game ecosystem, with motivated players, challenges, time constraints, rules, rewards, and enemies.

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