In a departure from what you might normally find coming out of TED, Neuroanotomist Jill Bolte Taylor tells the tale of the morning she studied her brain while having a stroke and the insight she took from that experience. What a beautiful and uplifting way to start your Thursday. Enjoy.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while and/or know me at all, you’re familiar with my absolute obsession with Alternate Reality Games (ARGs); specifically the currently running ARG for the upcoming Dark Knight movie that I’ve written about HERE and HERE. I love the engagement they demand from the players and how they personify different universes the players (our consumers) are passionate about.

Today we get to hear from Jane McGonigal, a “game designer, game researcher and future forecaster.” She’s been the brain behind some of the most popular ARGs around; her most recognized probably being I Love Bees, that was integral in promoting the release of Microsoft’s Halo 2. She’s most certainly going to have a laundry list of interesting insights and commentary. I’ll keep you posted with a bullet-style rundown of the talk.

• The lights dim. Here we go. The presentation starts off with a video introducing her new ARG The Lost Ring that she’s done to promote the 2008 Olympics in Bejing (drools). It’s been going on for about a week now, but you can still go to www.thelostring.com to get started. (I know what I’m doing tonight)
• With her ARGs she doesn’t want to make games more like the real world. Rather, she wants to make the real world more like games. Interesting thought. There’s a lot to be said there when we think about this in terms of brands.
• She’s doing research on “Happiness”. There’s a new field of psyh called Positive Psychology. She recommends reading Happiness, Stumbling on Happiness and a book on the backlash of happiness called Against Happiness. We’re talking about a new kind of happiness. It’s about the human brain and body and experiencing positive things in life…not juts feeling “happy”. Are we in the happiness business? She doesn’t think we are quite yet…but we will be very soon.
• A future forecast for 2013:
  • Quality of life becomes the primary metric for evaluating interactive brands, services, environments and experiences
  • Positive psych is an increasing principle
  • Communities form from a particular life that’s worth living
  • Value is defined as a measureable increase in real happiness — or well-being will be the capital of the future
• Games are the happiness engines
• In games we can be good at things that we’re not good at in real life…this is their ultimate draw. In multi-player games positive reinforcement is aplenty. Games can seem to have a better sense of community with shared qualities and sets of rules that all the players abide by than “real world” communities
• We’re experiencing a global mass exodus towards virtual worlds and game worlds. This shouldn’t necessarily cause panic. Kids are learning to be good at something
• For many gamers today, in terms of perceived quality of life, virtuality is beating reality
• Multi-player gaming, c.2008: It’s like we invented the written word and only decided to write books. Why are we only making games for the bound pages of the computer and/or the console
• She gives the example of Chorewars.com as way we can integrate a gaming reality into our reality…finally you can claim experience points for housework. I can already hear hoards of parents signing up.
• “To imagine the future, always look back at least twice as far as you are looking forward.”
• We should treat games like soap. They should be everywhere…in every building. Like soap kills germs, games kill boredom and in the process engages the players
• ARG designers are trying to embed these happiness engines in every day life
• The concept of “alternate reality” comes from science fiction. “An alternate reality is another way of experiencing existence” –G.S. Elrick, 1978
• Check out World Without Oil which she won the activism award for it here at SXSW’s Web Awards. The gist is that she set up an alternate reality for players in which they lived without oil. Great (and more importantly different) idea for a social awareness campaign
• Where do we go next? What tools could we use in getting ARGs going today?
  • Twitter?
  • Nike iPod?
  • Planes with communication systems? Playing a game about being on a plane?
  • Cars with GPS systems?
  • Any kind of non-traditional media…open up your mind and knock down the walls that tell you “it can’t be done”. Any type of media can be used to build and foster a story that takes place in an alternate reality

Phew. So that’s the keynote in bulleted nutshell. As I expected she had a lot to say in terms of both content and ideas. I can’t wait to see where ARGs go to next. How/Will they translate if a brand like Tide or Dell gives it a go? Is it a marketing engine built just for gamers or is this something that can cross demographic sets? I think if they’re thoughtfully customized they sure could be. I wouldn’t mind playing an ARG that takes me on a quest to find the next Dell mega-gaming machine. They could totally play off the “gaming machine of the future” angle. These are all questions to keep in mind. But I implore to pay attention to this type of thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if ARGs hit the mainstream sooner rather than later.

Thanks Jane for a wicked talk.

Web Upon has a great post listing off 10 “killer” Firefox extensions that you probably don’t know about. It’s a great list and one that’s made up of about 8 extensions I already have. If you run Firefox and you love sleek, well-designed productivity then I highly suggest you check it out and get some of these on your computer.

I will personally attest to the awesomeness that is Piclens. It’s a beautiful and refreshingly efficient way to nagivate through photos on websites like Flickr, Myspace and Facebook. I showed it to a sales rep here at SXSW who’s demoing Microsoft’s Silverlight and he just about fell out of his chair. You can download it HERE.

Thanks Web Upon. We love lists like these!

Every Sunday strangers from all over the world share with me their most intimate secrets via a beautiful (and sometimes equally disturbing) blog called PostSecret.com. The blog was started by Frank Warren, who is often referred to as “the most trusted stranger in America.” Every day he receives secrets from absolute strangers that divulge the silliest secrets (like a recent secret that has the sender admitting “I Nair my butt”) to secrets that speak to a more vulnerable side of people (like one that reads “I finally discovered that my greatest fear is not being alone; it’s being vulnerable”). You can check out a great video that gives you a great feel for what PostSecret’s about HERE. It’s one of the most authentic experiences of my week, and one I look forward to immediately after I finish reading the last secret from the last week. It might sound a little “out there”, but reading these secrets brings with it a sense of trust. If you haven’t heard or seen of the blog a suggest you block of an afternoon and read through the archives. It’s truly beautiful. It also makes you look to yourself and ask “what would I send in?” I can think of a few things off the top of my head…many more I’m sure if I thought about it.

Given my love of the blog, you can understand my excitement when I heard Warren was going be a keynote at SXSW. I’m sure he’ll have some kernels of truth and wisdom to bestow upon us all.

But yeah, all in all and long story short, postsecret.com is definitely worthy of an RSS feed subscription. It’s an odd take on a “social networking site”, but one that’s worthy of our admiration and attention.

UPDATE: I’ve had several people ask me if, indeed, there was a marriage proposal at the keynote. There was, and it was pretty damn cool. I guess Frank really does make people want to spill their secrets. Hehe.

So Sarah Lacy was the interviewer during the Mark Zuckerberg Keynote yesterday at SXSW that I wrote about here.  If you’ve read that entry you may remember that I mentioned the audience and Mark alike “ribbed” Lacy throughout the interview. Apparently it’s a much bigger deal than I originally figured it would be. In fact, …”in a grand move by SXSW attendees in Austin, Texas…” Sarah Lacy has been unanimously voted off the interwebs permanently. There’s even a website that’s been dedicated to it here: FAIL.

This cracks me up…this festival truely is populated by an influential and proactive population. I love it. For what it’s worth, I didn’t think she was THAT bad. Just a little chatty.