Jason’s Fresh Produce

In the broad category of increasing the intersection between the real and virtual world, I’ve been pondering several ideas tying the performance of a game character to some activity in real life. Examples include:

1) Tie the iPhone app that measures your running distance to the speed of a virtual world character. The more often you go out and run, the better your avatar gets at running.

2) Tie your number of weekly gym visits to the strength of your character. Cross promotions between, say L.A. Fitness and World of Warcraft could give gamers incentive to get out and get physical

3) Tie charitable donations to a character’s in-game wealth

And so on, and so forth. The point is, in the real world, consequences of our actions aren’t always straightforward, and they are frequently so small as to be beneath notice, at least in the short term. In a game, consequences can be magnified and we could leverage the feeling of virtual reward into real-world consequences.