Should I start this post like most others by saying “before this class I had never heard of AR?”  No.  Because I had heard of it.  Many summers ago I sat in a big tent at the Experimental Aviation Association’s annual AirVenture Fly-In air show watching some guy explain how pilots would soon be brought in to land by flying their planes through a series of virtual rings (think Sonic the Hedgehog type rings) whether in bad weather or just to show the novice where to go.  I was with my dad, he was nuts about this stuff.  Spoiler alert, but that didn’t happen.  That particular AR/gamification/futuristic “Flying for Dummies” idea went bust because they couldn’t populate each airport around the world with reliable software and hardware, nevermind each plane, but it showed AR is all around us in both game and non-game systems.  It was flight simulator, except you were actually flying.

The readings this week showcase some of the reasons I’m skeptical about AR taking over every aspect of our lives.  Like the airplane case, not all AR translates into actual reality for one reason or another.  The Cracked article about the 5 most insane ARGs made me laugh because the games weren’t insane, the people who played them were.  Your Halo 2 score should never stop you running from a hurricane folks…  Don’t get me wrong, the Easter Eggs these game and film companies put in are amazing and take a lot of work, but they hide the fact that our “open and free Internet” and ARGs where we enjoy all these mind-blowing experiences are really just promotions for us to buy things from corporate America.

The other article that struck me was the Manifesto about the 21st Century being the century of gaming.  It’s easy to see that this manifesto was written by gamers and for gamers, but it doesn’t reflect the world we live in.  I play two games in my life, Candy Crush Saga and TrainStation (both on Facebook).  They take up too much of my life, my mom says they’ll ruin my life, but they don’t define my life.  I’m more than my games, ladies I promise you!  So how can our century be defined by games?  I agree that games are much more prevalent than before, but just because Wikipedia can be edited and doesn’t fill a building on campus doesn’t mean it’s much different than a catalogue.  Our mouse has become our pneumatic tube, one isn’t more of a game than the other, it is just a new version.  The 20th Century was defined by much more than the moving picture.  First was the automobile (in the 1910’s the car was said to define that century), then the airplane (which vied with the cinema for people’s attentions) became accessible and the car was seen as so last century.  War defined the 20th Century, especially the first half, but when that was over the jet age had begun.  The golden age of flight (actually, the third golden age in six decades…) was soon forgotten by the Space Age (the entry for 20th Century on Wikipedia, that game of all encyclopedias, has a photo from space at the top).  And now?  Space is forgotten, brought to prominence only by a man with a moustache tweeting from space, not as a game, but as a reminder.  By the way, the Challenger disaster’s anniversary is today.  If space actually defined the 20th Century, why have we forgotten it so soon?  Perhaps that century (and likely this one) will be defined by change.  Not progress or advancement, but short attention spans.

I’m glad the manifesto was followed up with Heather Chaplin’s essay that does touch on the “dark side” of tech.  We don’t have jet packs.  We have sleep deprivation and repetitive stress.  Here’s an article that discusses the downside of tech in my field of study, museum work.

Technology, be it AR or soon-to-be AR, is in our lives to stay, but it doesn’t define us.  That’s my take, but maybe I don’t fully understand it yet.  After all, it comes from a guy who only ever owned Pokemon Crystal and Tetris Colour, and who was (and still is) baffled by the wide and narrow screen options of the GameBoy Advance…  Good night.