Monsters, zombies, heroes or villains: which will we become if video games turn out to be shaping the character of future generations?

There are books coming out on this subject all the time, some offering scary predictions of what video games might be doing to us. For most of us, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to read them. That doesn’t mean we aren’t worried.

Fortunately, there’s someone out there who does read a lot of that stuff and he somehow manages to put it all together in a clear and entertaining way. It’s Disney Imagineer emeritus, Jesse Schell. And after his Gamepocalypse talks of last year, he’s got some brand new and characteristically contrarian ideas about what games are doing to us.

That was Jesse’s keynote Make Games, Not War at Games For Change 2011 on June the 22nd. The slides for that talk are here in SlideShare.

After you’ve had a sample of Jesse’s amazing presentation, it may leave you wanting more.

Fortunately Jesse is one of those people who, if given the job of speaking about something, no matter how seemingly esoteric, he will always find some new and refreshingly unexpected insight, seen from his own distinctive and penetrating game designer’s perspective.

He definitely blew a few minds at this next one

Here he is speaking at something which quite frankly does not sound like it has anything at all to do with games or games design. It’s a convention for travel executives. He certainly takes them on an amazing journey to places I’ll bet even these well-travelled high-flyers have never been before.

Apologies for the fact that although it starts off with perfect lipsync, it goes a bit ‘laggy’ at the end.

You also can’t see the presentation slides (they aren’t in view), but it’s Jesse Schell, which means that it’s so brilliant that you won’t really mind (in fact, you can just close your eyes and listen, he’ll still put lots of new ideas into your head) but you can view them here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6J25WUpnCw

The next video is of Jesse speaking at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) Global Education Conference 2011 in New York City on April 10th.

The talk was called:

The Games We Play: Using Games to Influence Consumer Behavior