Don’t We Already Have That?

I was reading this great article by Jason Tanz on Wired (via Marco Arment) about the Facebook game spoof Cow Clicker, and this paragraph stuck out to me:

Game theorist Jesse Schell took this idea to its Orwellian extreme in a presentation at yet another industry conference. He described a world in which a person’s every action—brushing their teeth, showing up to work on time, tattooing an advertisement for Pop-Tarts onto their forearm—earned points. Schell says he wanted to encourage people to think carefully about which kinds of games and experiences were appropriate to develop.

It seems to me that we already live in just such a world. The “points” are just called “money” and cheating is not only allowed, but seemingly encouraged by the rules.

Disabled Comments

I’m going to take the route of John Gruber and Marco Arment, among others, and just keep comments globally disabled on this site. Why?

Well, mostly because I’m tired of fighting the spam. Allowing random people on the Internet to “contribute” to my site just opens me up to scripting attacks, and mostly it just enables spam bots to try to post crappy spam. Akismet is pretty good, but it doesn’t catch everything.

And, for everything else? I basically agree with everything that Marco Arment said. Comments are useful on some popular blogs (like Balloon Juice and asymco, for example), but I rarely get anything useful on mine.

If you want to contact me, or just shoot me a “thanks”, do it on twitter or via email.
If you want to respond to something I wrote, do it on your own blog, and link to me.