The Merchants of Cool
FRONTLINE explores how giant media corporations skillfully court the teenage consumer.
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We did the first Sprite.com and went to MTV launch party for Red Sky Interactive, Inc.
When you think of the ancient world, you probably picture towering buildings of white marble, adorned with statues also made of white marble. You’re not alone — most people picture the same thing. But we’re all wrong.
What if playing Angry Birds helped you keep your New Year’s resolutions? What if your World of Warcraft campaign got you to burn off a few extra pounds? What if you leveled up your Star Wars Jedi character by improving your focus with real life breathing exercises guided by Yoda in VR?
What if, when you got better at something in real life, your games were aware and your digital avatars improved as well? Would this feedback loop between you and your games drive personal growth and self-improvement?
The emerging field of Applied Entertainment says: Yes.
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Ask yourself: what does your toaster want? How about your dog? Or the bacteria in your gut? What about the pixels on the screen you’re reading off now—how is their day going? In other words, do things, animals, and other non-human entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness? It’s precisely this questions that the nascent philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology (arising from ὄντος, the Greek word for “being,” and known to the cool kids as OOO) is attempting to answer or at least seriously pose, and they’re setting certain segments of the art world on fire.
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