Projecting Surveillance Entertainment

Casual social surveillance is on the rise, from video games to internet productivity applications. These systems make our everyday online interactions social and present opportunities for performance or embarrassment. Here are some examples of social information systems up and running now, and scenarios where they haven’t yet been seen:

• Xbox Live can tell online friends what video games you’re playing. What if DVD players told your friends what movies you watch?

• World of Warcraft watches players using skinning tools on creature pelts, leveling them up as leatherworkers. What if Google Docs watched people writing business plans and leveled them up for repeated revisions?

• Jaiku aggregates your various feeds from the Web and merges them into a mobile profile. What if you were engaged in a constant game of signalling social presence and media awareness through your devices and not playing was tantamount to death?

• Our game PMOG, a Firefox extension that follows players as they browse the Web. PMOG gives points and tools for playful internet annotation, and begs the question: how do you design a game where all of human data is the playfield?

This session will describe a few directions for surveillance entertainment. In addition, we’ll discuss appropriate boundaries for future applications that give social networks access to our data trails. Finally, we’ll imagine the life of someone for whom play is a constant background task.