Experience Engineers
This is a fictional monologue I performed several years ago at NYU. It was written by Michael Carychao and myself.
It has ideas that I often want to reference in other writing, so I’m giving it a home here.
Experince Enginereers 2024
Madame President, Council of Elders, Representatives, we meet today, near the end of 2042—a year of incredible highs and lows, one that saw the first human, baby Evelyn, born on Mars and the last of the arctic glaciers melt. We meet with a mixture of awe and despair to consider the future of Earth and humanity. Today, we’ve heard from brilliant scientists, economists, and politicians. But I’m here to speak to you about something closer to the human experience than theories and policies, something more ancient that can influence the lives of billions in the blink of an eye, something with the power to radically improve our collective future: Entertainment.
Not just any entertainment: Applied Entertainment. Entertainment put to work.
I’m an Experience Engineer—which means that I weave together personal and biometric sensor data, stories, and games to train new behaviors through fun. There was a time when I hated people like me. Now I think we’re the future’s best chance. To explain, I have to take you back to my childhood, to a time before my father’s every heartbeat was for sale.
I’d sit on the tractor in my dad’s lap as we made the rounds, my sister and I hopping down to reprogram the second-hand harvest-bots. We lived on a typical midwest farm growing organic cannabis, trying to compete with Monsanto. We all know how that turned out. The Depression of 2029 wiped out us little guys. With four kids and debtors calling, my father took a “generous” offer. He granted unlimited, perpetual access to his biometric data—for cash.
After that, any time his biochemistry, mood, and attention were in the so-called “sweet spot,” he was inundated with ads for products and services that did not serve his health or his well-being—nor that of his family—but only served to line someone’s pocket.
Predatory neuromarketing destroyed my father. The synthetic “foods,” unnecessary medications, and subscriptions to everything from gambling to fast food stole his attention and ultimately made him sicker and sicker. When I was thirteen, I had to leave school to be his full-time caretaker. The five of us lived in a one-bedroom apartment filled with random things advertisers conned into buying. And all the while, he defended these addictions—and they were addictions—and he defended them because he was made to feel good every step along the way by Experience Engineers.
That winter, my father died of a heart attack. He was 43.
My sister quickly got us all on blockchain activity-wallets and set our preferences to maximize our data privacy. I couldn’t enter into contracts that so much as peeped at my biometric data. I hated it. I was limited to holo-movies, almost no games, and zero social media.
Eventually, I found progressive, reputable Experience Engineers. They designed games to help me, not rip me off. Instead of being pulled into a world of endless, negative pleasure loops, like my father had been, entertainment improved my life—through play, through fun.
When I realized this could have saved my dad, I knew I’d found my calling.
So how does one engineer experience?
The first ingredient is the sensor. Statistically speaking, ninety-eight percent of you in this room use some sort of biometric sensor; these sensors are in our underwear, shoelaces, rings; they are beneath our skin and in our bloodstream. Roughly sixty percent of you wear the new contact lenses from Magic Leap or Google. Actually, it’s precisely sixty-three point seven-five percent of you. And two of you are watching YouTube videos of cats in space. I can’t compete with that, so enjoy. Twelve percent of you have experimented with pills containing health-bots, which flood your body to monitor hormone levels. For those rare few who don’t have any sensors on or in their person, worry not, you’re included: the sensors in this room pick up plenty of data about your physiological and inferred psychological state. None of us are invisible. Not today.
Sensors continuously record and transmit our heart rate, breath rate, brain state, glucose levels, mood, neurotransmitter activity, the breakdown of our amino acids, fats, sugars, salt, and more, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The second ingredient is story, the language of our brains. When we experience a story that makes us cast predictions into the future, our brains surge with dopamine—the addictive, feel-good chemical of reward. And when a character really hooks us, we release oxytocin, the bonding chemical.
The third ingredient, game, puts us in the story by requiring our active participation. The fourth part, behavioral science, makes a discipline of cues, nudges, and feedback loops. And the fifth piece is training—being intentional about what we are getting better at while playing: mashing a button—or things like running, science, and surgery? Together these five parts can build an “Experience.”
And let’s be honest, this recipe is working. For people who play them: Obesity is down. Heart disease is down. Substance abuse is down. Physical activity is at an all-time high. Grades are up—for schools that still have them. Rates of anxiety and depression have decreased. These are all the results of carefully crafted experiences.
My friends and I found these games that use Applied Entertainment, where onscreen and off-screen play merge.
We’d play soccer in the field behind our school and rack up points to improve our character stats and upgrade gear in Star Wars. Yoda taught me how to meditate in that field so that I’d be able to use the Force in the game. I still do Jedi meditations to this day. I know now that they are just physiological techniques that regulate my neurochemistry, but Star Wars got me there. I felt like I was a Jedi.
I remember sitting outside wearing those thick Magic Leap sunglasses, regulating my breath and getting my heart rate to slow down—and once it was in the zone, my hands would start glowing in the game, and I could heal my friends in World of Warcraft, the AR edition. I’d get a twenty percent bonus to healing every time I took another Red Cross emergency training class. In World of Warcraft, I was a healer. In real life, I got my first job as an EMT.
I played Marvel’s The Message and activated latent genetic powers by learning how to combine elements from the periodic table. I learned more about chemistry, microbiology, and genetics in that game than I ever had in high school. That game prepared me for college.
Later, my girlfriend and I leveled up by limiting our sugar and fat intake and doing simple things like turning off lights and unplugging unused electronics. We were good at it. We were disciplined. We saved up enough Amazon Bucks to feed us through college—real food, good food; no more instant ramen.
Meanwhile, I played that multi-faith Hospice experience Die Before Death with my grandmother as she practiced dying. In the last year of her life, far from being scared of death, she was open and curious about what the final moments of life would be like.
I stopped passively watching screens. My life filled with games. Games that put my biometric data to work, put me in the narrative, and created impact in the world
I helped bring awareness to ocean conservation by playing Oceania. And when the earthquake of 2034 hit, our household and the neighborhood were prepared because we’d all been playing HBO’s Resiliants for three or four seasons. We had extra food and water, backup generators, and escape routes planned. A game did that with access to our data.
My father died giving me a chance to contribute to humanity. His death set me on a path. And I won’t, I can’t, bury my head in the sand and pretend the pressing issues will just go away. We can do something, and so we must.
We need billions of new players to participate in games that tackle critical collective projects—like repairing this planet, ending racism, and discovering new ways to enjoy life’s depths, life’s beauty, and each other!
We don’t need more entertainment designed to distract and ensnare. We need entertainment designed to engage, empower, and transform. We need entertainment to help solve the world’s most pressing issues and to return us to our humanity. And we need to work together to achieve this. So, ask: Is our entertainment working for us? Is it doing all that it can?
Madame President, Councilors, Representatives, on behalf of the future of Applied Entertainment: Thank you.
