This Facebook Future

I'm not sure if I should freak out now or bend over and meekly submit to the tidal wave of megacorporations merging game and reality into a dystopian future.

What can I say? It -is- coming. Maybe not as crazy a future as he paints, but I know at least a good 75% of the people in my office have a Facebook account. Especially the young people.

My keen avoidance of Facebook and LinkedIn and other such sites make me a social pariah, a corporate-branded-tech-Luddite hermit, in the eyes of most of the regular Joes at work. Which is somewhat keenly hilarious considering I am probably the nerdiest and geekiest and hardcore gamer of them all.

Despite my attempt to steer away from any invasion of personal RL with the virtual worlds I love to explore, I am not immune to the tsunami of reality-internet merge.

I buy stuff (mostly games) digitally all the time. Any time I use a credit card, I have to register an account with my real name, otherwise questions will get asked as to why I am providing different info.

I am quite hopelessly dependent on Steam... my only privacy defence is a Friends-only profile, a commonly used handle, and a lucky hyphen or two in the name that makes me un-locatable with the current tech of the search engine they are using.

I have reluctantly, if relatively anonymously, signed up onto Bioware's so-called 'social' networking site because I want the 'free' DLC from their games. To a certain extent, I have even admired how the site tracks your characters' achievements and levels from game to game. My only escape is that I have no real life gamer friends to entangle myself into a competitive network of "ha, I got more achievements than thou." This goes, to a lesser extent, for Steam as well.

Yes, I freely admit I rather enjoy the achievable achievements on Steam. Or even, *sobs* the ones Microsoft's Home network doles out for playing Dawn of War II. Again, my only solace is that there is not a second or third or Nth person that I am linked to, to form comparisons about my Gamerscore or lack of it. Right now, they are just personal private markers of where I've been, when I felt like playing the game in question.

They could end up more, depending on how obnoxious companies get about such things.

I did not really know of the existence of things like Farmville, of Club Penguin, of Webkinz. I did not know they were that big.

It is indeed scary, a world where the mundanes play 'games' that bear no resemblance to what we would recognise as such, but instead are gigantic Skinner boxes of real/virtual cash feeding of big corporations.