Welcome to the Decade of Games

For those of you still trying to wrap your head around the meteoric rise of social networking over the past decade, this post might hurt a little bit. Because just as you and most of the world were getting a handle on it, the decade of social abruptly ended.

I don't mean that we will stop using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to share with our friends, colleagues and families. In fact, quite the opposite is true, our combined usage of these social networks will continue to increase. Rather, the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we'll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled. Construction on the social layer ended with the launch of Facebook's Open Graph protocols over the last several months. All the interesting social stuff that will occur over the next decade (and there'll be lots, I'm sure), will exist within this predefined framework built and controlled by Facebook. In short, the decade of social is over.

What's taking its place? The decade of games.

When you hear games, you probably immediately think about things like World of WarCraft, the Nintendo Wii and Farmville. And while those are huge (and will get even bigger) I'm talking about the underlying game dynamics that are the core building blocks of those games. And in this decade of games, these game dynamics will move far beyond your computer screen and into decidedly non-game like environments, like the way we court customers, engage with others at work, discover where to hang out on Saturday nights and what, when and how we choose to purchase. More and more of these dynamics are being cleverly leveraged in real-world scenarios to influence your behavior. While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence.

Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behavior.

The decade of games is starting now because cultural and technological shifts have led us to a perfect convergence of reach, relevance and demand. We're able to reach people anywhere at any time thanks to the powerful mobile devices that now travel everywhere we go. Facebook's Open Graph enables us to provide relevance to anyone with instant access to the social graph of connections. And there's the demand. Traditional forms of entertainment (movies, television... remember books?) are in a rapid decline. The demand for entertainment hasn't decreased, it's just shifted to a more interactive, pervasive form of entertainment. It's shifting to games.