The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured.
More Quotes by Tom Chatfield
From exam grading to health education to professional training to democratic participation, paths towards self-realization and success in the world are often daunting and obscure: journeys only the privileged feel confident setting off along.
For the moment, machines able to 'think' in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction. How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question - not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.
The biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash - that's nice - it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.
Even when they're not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.
I spoke at TED Global 2010 about the ways that video games engage the brain, and in particular, the idea of reward structures: how a challenge or task can be broken down and presented to make it as engaging as possible.
Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.