Achievements and the Future of Privacy

Link from Legend of Zelda

It’s Monday morning of November 30th 1998. You are out on recess with your buddies talking about your current progress in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. An envious look befalls your friend’s faces as you tell them about how you just beat the Water Temple last night. You feel a great sense of accomplishment as you describe your heroic acts from the night before.

This is how we used to convey our achievements to our friends. Word of mouth was king in a time before the Internet permeated every aspect of our daily lives. Now flash forward to 2006. You just completed the final level in Gears of War on the Xbox 360, but times have changed. Your game controller flashes green and the familiar “Achievement Unlocked” information bubble appears on the bottom of your TV screen. A minute later your friend from across the country sends you a message over Xbox Live congratulating you on finishing the game.

Gears of War

Eight years apart and the way that we share pieces of information like that with our friends has changed quite a bit. You don’t have to do anything for your achievements to be blasted out to all the people you have on your friends list. You can even share achievements with people all over the world, like in the example above. Of course sharing achievements this way doesn't mean that we don’t talk to our friends in person about our digital adventures.

Now lefts jump forward again. The year 2039, 25 years from now. Technology is absolutely ingrained into everything that we do. Everything is connected and everything communicates with everything else. You open the fridge door and notice you are all out of milk. “Get Milk” is automatically added to your to-do list. Later that day when you get back from the store and put the milk into the fridge you get a notification letting you know that task is ticked off your to-do list. Three minutes later you get another notification. It is from your son who is at school. He is thanking you for getting milk so that he can have it with his cereal tomorrow morning.

Technology continues to march on like it always has and always will. People at Facebook or Google come up with ideas and say “Hey wouldn't it be cool if…?” Will there come a time where contentedness will overstep its bounds? Should every event that takes place in our lives be broadcast out to a social network for everyone to see? How far is too far and where do we draw the line?

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Sean McParland

Sources:

·        http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1998

o   Finding a believable timeframe for the opening narrative

·        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time

o   Release date for LOZ:OOT in North America

·        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War

o   Release date for Gears of War

·        http://achievementgen.com/360/display.php?image=EQ0LqEAq.png&p=0

o   Used to generate the custom achievement image