Some online activities are already or could easily be made into formal games.
Take, for example, the activity of using a news reader like Google Reader to “share,” or “like” a story. Both of these gestures create a more filtered web, which is a small gain for the information economy. But they may be rooted in a selfish pleasure: the desire to role play.
When I share a story, I have some particular friends in mind. But I’m also making sense of that story for myself by marking it as “worth sharing.” It’s a way of filing or categorizing information; a self-centered as well as a selfless gesture. A kind of performance.
I thought of performing online while watching Albert Brooks’ movie Real Life. A parody of reality television from 30 years ago, the movie is on to some next level shit. (See the picture below.)
Throughout, Brooks has characters performing for each other because of the presence of new media technology. The fictional documentarians are using giant white, futuristic masks as cameras. It points to the way we act, literally, when we engage in mediated socializing.
(The movie may also be too clever to be enjoyed as a comedy. When actor-director Brooks, playing himself in the movie, celebrates the realness of the fire he has set to mimic the drama of a fictional movie in the final scene of his fake documentary, the audience finds itself standing over the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote.)
You talking to me?