…Thanks to Booyah, an iPhone game that awards players “points” for completing tasks in real life such as “buying a pair of Nikes.” (Apparently, buying fresh Dunks has a value beyond protecting the feet from the elements/stylelessness.)

Says chief Booyah exec. Keith Lee:

“You’re not just getting a sword in a video game for completing a task… You’re creating a better version of yourself in real life.”

With reality augmentation in full swing, it makes good business sense for Apple and her drones to fill the market with Booyah-esque apps. They are recursive, after all. They have the capacity to award in-game points for playing the game - for buying Apple/Booyah/Nike products, for encouraging others to do so. In this way, they are “viral” IRL. They transport memes out of the space of pixels and ideas and into the space of def Nikes, cash money, and, well, the reality we see, or think we see.

As our reality is augmented (by us - we need no Big Brother to do it for us), reality IRL will resemble reality “in-game,” a la the dream-life confusion of Paprika or the stage-audience confusion of Synecdoche, New York. Each augmented human will be able to see, literally, the reality she wishes to see, though she will be increasingly hard-pressed to resist or even remain conscious of all the ads and meta-ads programmed into that reality. These meta-elements - ads inducing or allowing for augmentation - will create reality as it is seen and will not appear alien. Indeed, “real” reality will increasingly appear as a stark vacation-home compared to the “rich” and natural environment of the individual/individualized augmented mind.

To quote Mr. Lee again:

“There’s no shortage of business models here.”

Booyah!

Personally, I do need someone to award me “points” for accomplishing basic life tasks. I think my cat would be more useful if he could tally, using something simple like chalk and a blackboard, my total earnings for tooth-brushing, laundering, writing my novel, &c.